I was hit by this the other day, I have a couple of systems built using
Bullseye's suggested 500mb /boot for encrypted root. I now can't even
fit 2 kernels.
MODULES=dep makes almost no difference - 10mb smaller?
I even tried reducing the ext4 reserved space from 5% to 0, which is far
from ideal and still didn't free up enough space.
Purging firmware-ath9k-htc firmware-carl9170 amd64-microcode
firmware-amd-graphics and firmware-intel-graphics didn't help - plus if
i ever want to add wifi or switch to an amd/intel graphics card i'm
going to be in trouble.
zstd I noticed is now being used, that should make things smaller not
bigger, is that new, did something go wrong there?
I use nvidia and plymouth which is the standard desktop install with a
graphical cryptsetup prompt and I'm having the same problem on my
intel-only laptop, so not just an nvidia thing (unless its installed but
not used).
I went through the pain of shrinking a LUKS root to make a bigger /boot
and now I find a 1gb /boot can't fit 3 kernels!
Part of the problem is the initrd.img-6.9.9-amd64.dpkg-bak and
initrd.img-6.9.9-amd64.new files mean that you've got to have enough
room for 3x the latest kernel, plus one of any previous kernels, so for
a typical three kernel install that's now 5x 237mb plus vmlinuz and
stuff, we're talking 1300mb absolute minimum.
Given that the initrd's have almost tripled in size, this is going to
cause chaos when Trixie becomes stable - everyone will have to reinstall
with a 2gb /boot and there will be no upgrade path.
Looking at some backups, its not the fault of the 6.9 kernels, just
something that happened around the time of their release:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 237M Jul 21 02:17 initrd.img-6.9.10-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 237M Jul 19 11:59 initrd.img-6.9.9-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 85M Jul 8 17:23 initrd.img-6.9.8-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 85M Jul 7 23:32 initrd.img-6.9.7-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 85M Jun 19 18:20 initrd.img-6.8.12-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 2 root root 85M Jun 7 13:32 initrd.img-6.8.11-amd64
On https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=972396 there's a
suggested patch to use mktemp to move the .new temp file to /tmp but
that only partially helps as you still have .dpkg-bak
Realistically we need a fix for whatever happened here and it can't be
any of:
* remove plymouth or firmware (not practical for desktop)
* make /boot bigger (not upgrade friendly)
* MODULES=dep (not effective)
As for updating the docs and installer - my bookworm stable box has two
6.1 kernels in a 471mb /boot with room for a couple more, so....
--
Simon John
