On 17.02.2012 07:23, Martin Pitt wrote: > Dustin Kirkland [2012-02-16 10:11 -0600]: >> 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 agree. Especially since we switched to a two-weeks kernel update > rhythm where almost every update in the most recent stable and LTS > releases breaks ABI, kernels pile up like mad. > >> 1) Surely we're not the only Ubuntu users whose /boot or root >> partition has filled up with age-old kernels, are we? > > Certainly not. I ran into several "home support" cases where Ubuntu > started acting strangely because the root partition filled up, and we > removed about 15 old kernels. > >> 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? > > TBH, I don't think c-j or any other manual tool is the right answer > here. While it's nice to have it, it doesn't feel right that Ubuntu > "automatically" introduces the problem, but not automatically clean > up after itself. > >> 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)? > > I think it'd be best if update-manager would auto-remove all kernel > packages except the most recent two or three during dist-upgrade. This > needs to be specified carefully of course, as people might explicitly > run a kernel from the previous distro release. So perhaps some > clevernes like if you install linux-image-3.2.0-N-generic, delete all > kernels up to linux-image-3.2.0-(N-2)-generic. >
While agreeing that it would be quite helpful and seems appropriate to have the cleanup automatic, there is a slight potential pitfall (or two). There are various flavours of kernels and people may or may not deliberately have those installed in parallel. Also various releases had sometimes a changing set of depending packages. For a while this should be only linux-backports-modules (there had been linux-ubuntu-modules and linux-restricted-modules). Though this is not so much of a problem. >From a pattern matching point of view the generic-pae kernels are a bit of a pain as they tend to ruin the "use the last part of a split by "-" for the flavor". But anyway, I think the main issue is the various flavours, so a cleanup that is automatic should retain the last three of each, even though this may tend to leave more kernels around. -Stefan > linux-headers-* is already covered by apt-get autoremove, which is > good. Perhaps we can mark older kernels as auto-removable as well, so > that without any other tools you at least have one command to clean > them up all? > > For servers it'd be even better if apt-get dist-upgrade would do the > cleanup itself, of course. But we have fewer places to hook into the > logic than in update-manager, so this might be tricky. > > Martin > -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
