I understand that I'm not the first to ask this question. In fact, I
see at least 10 similar questions at AskUbuntu.com, and many more
duplicates:
* http://askubuntu.com/search?q=remove+old+kernels
This week, I received a message from one of our commercial ISP/Cloud
Hosting Providers, saying:
>>> Unlike other Linux distributions, Ubuntu does not automatically remove
>>> older, unused kernel packages after an update. Over time, this will fill
>>> the boot partition and result in future updates failing.
The email continued, recommending that we clean up old Ubuntu kernels
using this command:
# dpkg --get-selections|grep 'linux-image*'|awk '{print $1}'|egrep
-v "linux-image-$(uname -r)|linux-image-generic" |while read n;do
apt-get -y remove $n;done
Truly, I connected to several of my Ubuntu servers, some of which have
been running for over 4 years, and I manually purged 3GB+ of old
kernels on some machines!
I don't want to go into all the ways and reasons that the one-liner
above is sub-optimal or even evil, but I would like to call attention
to the generic problem and suggest that as a distribution, we provide
a supported and recommended utility to handle this.
I asked about this in IRC yesterday, and Colin Watson pointed me to
the computer-janitor utility, which is intended to handle this.
Seconds later, Barry Warsaw told me that computer-janitor should die
:-) I tried computer-janitor on my desktop, and it seemed to work
okay. But then I tried it on my servers and it failed:
# sudo computer-janitor find
ERROR:dbus.proxies:Introspect error on :1.3:/:
dbus.exceptions.DBusException:
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Rejected send message, 1
matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.8" (uid=0 pid=26155
comm="/usr/bin/python /usr/sbin/computer-janitor find ")
interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable" member="Introspect"
error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination=":1.3" (uid=0
pid=19905 comm="/usr/bin/python /usr/share/computerjanitor/janitor")
So I guess my questions are:
1) Surely we're not the only Ubuntu users whose /boot or root
partition has filled up with age-old kernels, are we?
2) Is computer-janitor here to stay, or to be abandoned in favor of
something else?
3) Can we expect computer-janitor to work on command-line only
environments (Ubuntu servers) too? If so, can we get SRUs out so that
it works on older distributions?
4) Can we, as a distro, provide and recommend a utility to clean out
specifically old kernels (perhaps aside from cleaning up userspace
cruft a la computer-janitor)?
--
:-Dustin
Dustin Kirkland
Ubuntu Core Developer
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