[Bug 1037285] Re: /boot fills up after many kernel upgrades

[Shaun Crampton]

Some thoughts on this bug:

When /boot does run out of space, it causes the next install of a kernel
package to fail, leaving the package in a broken state as far as apt is
concerned.  That makes it impossible to remove the old kernel packages
using apt: apt won't remove packages until you successfully run apt-get
-f install to fix broken packages but apt-get -f install won't run until
you remove the old packages.

That means that the only way to get things working again is to manually
remove some old files from /boot, then run apt-get -f install and then
apt-get remove to remove the old kernel packages.  That's a real pain
for a technical user like myself but it's impossible for a non-technical
user.

This bug might not be a security vulnerability in its own right but it
can certainly compound other security vulnerabilities.  Being stuck with
an unpatched kernel even though you have a cron job that does a sudo
apt-get upgrade every night could be a big problem.

I suspect that more users will be affected by this bug but the lack of a
clear error probably means that non-technical users just give up or
ignore it.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1037285

Title:
  /boot fills up after many kernel upgrades

Status in “ubuntu-meta” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  THIS ISSUE MAY PREVENT SECURITY UPDATES TO THE KERNEL.

  Obsolete versions of the kernel remain installed on a system, causing a full /boot or wasting space on single-partition installations.
  This has the effect that (some) software updates no longer work (at least those to the kernel):

  update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-29-generic

  gzip: stdout: No space left on device
  [...]
  Errors were encountered while processing:
   initramfs-tools
  E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

  To resolve this, the user must figure out which packages to deinstall.
  A novice user will not know what to do.

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