On 8/14/25 19:51, Jonathan Wiebe wrote:
I am going through the process of preparing my bookworm system for upgrade to
trixie.
The following statement from section 5.15 of the release notes caught my eye:
- Before starting the upgrade, make sure your `/boot` partition is at least
768 MB in size, and has about 300 MB free. If your system does not have a
separate `/boot` partition, there should be nothing to do.
My /boot partition is only 488 MB in size. Here is the output of lsblk:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 512M 0 part
├─sda3 8:3 0 9.3G 0 part
├─sda4 8:4 0 23.8G 0 part
├─sda5 8:5 0 9.3G 0 part
└─sda6 8:6 0 851.3G 0 part /home/jonathan/Storage
sdb 8:16 0 3.6T 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 3.6T 0 part /media/jonathan/Borg-Backup
nvme0n1 259:0 0 476.9G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 488M 0 part /boot
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 476G 0 part
├─debian--vg-root 254:0 0 47.9G 0 lvm /
├─debian--vg-swap_1 254:1 0 976M 0 lvm [SWAP]
└─debian--vg-home 254:2 0 408.1G 0 lvm /home
As long as I am going through the process of resizing partitions I thought I
would increase the size of the /boot partition to 2 GB.
I am also thinking of increasing my swap partition from 1GB to 32 GB (I have 32
GB of RAM).
So what I believe I have to do is:
1. Reduce the size of the lvm logical volume debian--vg-home by 32.5 GB.
2. Increase the size of the lvm logical volume debian--vg-swap by 31 GB.
3. Reduce the size of the lvm physical volume by 1.5 GB.
4. Move the lvm physical volume to the right (if that is the correct way to
put it) to make room for the increased size of /boot.
5. Increase the size of the /boot partition by 1.5 GB.
(Do I need to move the lvm logical volume debian--vg-home before extending
swap?)
Three questions:
1. Does the above outline make sense?
2. Can anyone point me to the documentation which will show me how to do this?
3. Am I over complicating things? Should I just backup my home partition and
re-install from scratch with all new partitions and then restore /home?
Thanks!
--
Jonathan Wiebe
Our passions are there to drive us to act, not to be the seasoning of our
emotional stew.
Sent with Proton Mail secure email.
I am curious about sda -- ~31.2G is unaccounted for. Is that for SSD
over-provisioning?
2025-08-15 14:32:52 dpchrist@laalaa ~
$ perl -e 'print 931.4-0.512-9.3-23.8-9.3-851.3, $/'
37.1880000000002
Both sda and nvme0n1 each appear to have both an OS and data:
1. I put each OS instance on its own disk and put as much data as
possible on a file server. I keep my OS instances small enough to fit
onto a "16 GB" device -- HDD, SSD, USB flash drive, SD card, etc.. I
allocate "1 GB" each for ESP, boot, and swap, and most of the remainder
for root:
2025-08-15 15:19:42 dpchrist@laalaa
~/bullseye-secure-uefi.tracy.holgerdanske.com/examine-host.out
$ grep -v nvme lsblk.out
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 14.9G 0 disk
|-sda1 8:1 0 953M 0 part /boot/efi
|-sda2 8:2 0 954M 0 part /boot
|-sda3 8:3 0 954M 0 part
| `-sda3_crypt 254:1 0 954M 0 crypt [SWAP]
`-sda4 8:4 0 11.2G 0 part
`-sda4_crypt 254:0 0 11.2G 0 crypt /
2. Combining the OS and data on one disk complicates disaster
preparedness and recovery via imaging (e.g. dd(1), Clonezilla, etc.).
It is easiest and safest to take an image of an entire disk -- you know
everything is in sync. But when the disk has OS-plus-data, imaging
takes longer and requires more storage. Moving the data into a
dedicated partition is a work-around, if you are willing to manage
piecemeal images -- MBR, primary GPT, ESP, boot partition, swap
partition, root partition, secondary GPT, etc..
3. Keeping the OS instances on a separate drive facilitates OS major
version upgrades via backup, wipe, fresh install, and restore. I find
this approach to be simpler, to be more likely to succeed, and to
produce a result that is more reliable than OS major version upgrades
via in-place modification. And, the former approach forces me to
exercise my backup and restore skills.
4. Motherboard firmware, the Windows installer, Windows Update, the
Debian installer, update-grub(8), update-grub2(8), etc., typically look
for bootable partitions and/or ESP's on all disks in a given computer.
If you have multiple disks with such, the result could be confusion and
broken boot for one or more OS's. I avoid these problems by installing
mobile racks in my computers, putting each OS on its own disk, and
inserting only one OS disk at a time (except when I boot a live disk to
work on the OS disk).
David
