I installed Rocky 9.5 with Cinnamon desktop with defaults (as far as I know) several weeks ago. After doing normal updates since installing, today I noticed a warning that “boot” was full. I found that there were only 3 kernels installed which is pretty standard. But, it seemed that more than 600MB of the 1GB boot was occupied by initramfs img files. I did a “dnf remove --oldinstallonly” and it removed 2 kernels and their img files so I have about half the boot partition free now.
But I don’t understand why Rocky doesn’t have a system in place to keep boot trim and fit. Or have I done something wrongly?
There is “system in place”, same as in RHEL. That is, installonly_limit is set in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf.
However,
- It is set to 3
- kdump is enabled by default
dracut-config-rescueis a “Core” package
That means that there will be:
- initramfs for 3 kernels
- kdump initramfs for 3 kernels
- “fat” initramfs for the rescue kernel
All that fits to the 1GB filesystem. By default. Add some third-party kernel modules that go into initramfs and things get bigger. For example, the NVidia’s kmods are quite large.
One could decrease installonly_limit to 2 and disable the kdump (if not needed).
Thank you. This is exactly the explanation I was looking for.
I’m still curious about what I installed that might have bloated things. And it seems like 1.5GB might be a better size if things like nvidia drivers can make 3 kernels pop over the 1GB limit.