[Bug 1357093] Re: Kernels not autoremoving, causing out of space error on LVM or Encrypted installation or on any installation, when /boot partition gets full

[Dave Eckhardt]

jarnos,

The reason why I responded first/primarily about "apt-get autoremove"
and "purge-old-kernels" is that those are listed at the top of the page
and are the things that a regular-ish user could feel confident doing.

I do not feel that the idea of running unattended-upgrade from the
command line is likely to be helpful to many users.  Among other things,
that presumes that the user always gets in there before being prompted
by the automatic update GUI program (which, by the way, doesn't say "I
am going to install a kernel"; it says "I have 192 MB of security
updates that I would like you to approve", unless you dive into
details).

As for un-clogging, I did in fact read the "Safely Removing Old Kernels"
text.  What I wrote was "I personally can manually grub around and
remove kernels, so this is only annoying, not show-stopping, but I think
we have lots of evidence that it is show-stopping for some people".  I
continue to believe that.

I did not see a response from you to what I genuinely believe is the
single core issue:  anything (unattended-upgrades, GUI install widget,
apt, flying spaghetti monster) that installs a kernel without deleting a
kernel will eventually overflow /boot.

Then there is a second issue, which is that because a variety of things
have installed too many kernels on the machines of people who cannot be
expected to manually delete kernels, there should be some automatically-
run solution (perhaps prompting the user for confirmation for safety
purposes) that deletes long-stale kernels that no current automatic
thing considers itself responsible for.

What I see is:
(1) new users keep showing up because their machines have broken,
(2) people keep proposing new solutions that are different than the existing solutions.

To me this says that there is still a real problem (for some people, not
for me, but I don't think the aspiration of the Ubuntu project is for
machines running Ubuntu to work only for expert users).

Thanks for taking the time to respond!  I am not responding because I am
personally troubled by this issue, but because I believe that the
problem has not been solved for regular end users.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1357093

Title:
  Kernels not autoremoving, causing out of space error on LVM or
  Encrypted installation or on any installation, when /boot partition
  gets full

Status in unattended-upgrades:
  New
Status in unattended-upgrades package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Currently if one chooses to use LVM or encrypted install, a /boot
  partition is created of 236Mb

  Once kernel updates start being released this partition soon fills
  until people are left unable to upgrade.

  While you and I might know that we need to watch partition space, many
  of the people we have installing think that a windows disk is a disk
  and not a partition, education is probably the key - but in the
  meantime support venues keep needing to deal with the fact the
  partition is too small and/or old kernels are not purged as new ones
  install.

  For workaround and sytem repair, see
  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RemoveOldKernels

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