Hi all, Many of you know me as the leader of Ubuntu Studio and member of the Ubuntu Community Council. However, in my day job, I'm the User Experience and Packaging director for the Kubuntu Focus project.
For those of you unfamiliar, Kubuntu Focus is a line of laptop computers that come with Kubuntu preinstalled. This makes us an OEM for Kubuntu, and Ubuntu by extension. With that in mind, I work for Michael Mikowski in this regard. He's a highly experienced developer and system administrator, but is not currently an Ubuntu member or Ubuntu developer and cannot post on this list, which is why I'm acting as an intermediary with both my Ubuntu developer and Kubuntu Focus hats on. With that in mind, please read the forwarded message below to understand the context for this. Please respond to this message not only to the mailing list, but to mmikow...@kfocus.org as well. Thanks, Erich ----------------------------------------- Erich Eickmeyer Project Leader - Ubuntu Studio Member - Ubuntu Community Council ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Michael Mikowski <mmikow...@kfocus.org> Date: Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 18:38 Subject: /boot disk partition size To: <ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com> Hi Everyone: Members of the Ubuntu Foundations Team asked me to clarify the issue with / boot. You can see the bugs filed at https://launchpad.net/bugs/1959971 and https://launchpad.net/bugs/1960089. *Personal Background:* I currently lead the Kubuntu Focus <https://kfocus.org> engineering efforts, and have been a professional product engineer specializing in mission-critical HP/HA/HV systems for decades. You can see a overview of my experience at https://michaelmikowski.com. *My Assessments:* *0. This is a low-cost, high-return proposal.* People have pushed back against increasing the /boot partition, but I find most of the reasoning does not consider the true impact of a small /boot partition to the complete product. *1. The cost to provide the space needed is minimal for almost all FDE systems. *So why not just do it? Of course, there is more work to be done for the rest of the product (guide users on kernel selection; improve the kernel cleaning logic), but this is an important component that is required in any complete solution. It would provide substantial relief to many users immediately. *2. An overfull /boot partition is catastrophic for many users.* Many cannot recover their system because they don't have a rescue disk or knowledge of ext4, chroot, LUKS, lvm, cryptesetup, package management, and more. These people either reload the OS or give up. *3. This happens frequently, even when everything works as designed*, and even when just using a single kernel flavor. While on IRC yesterday discussing this, 3 unsolicited individuals stepped in to comment about how this is needed. And those are advanced developers who know better. Search for 'ubuntu full /boot partition' and check out how frequently this continues to occur. *4. There are many use cases where multiple kernel flavors will occur*, such as when the users switches from HWE to OEM to address hardware issues, or they install lowlatency for studio work. When this happens, the current size boot partition is highly likely to fill. This can corrupt the system and require a rescue disk for recovery. Check out the DFMEA which is used to assess the severity of a failure mode: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-auto/+bug/1959971/comments/7 Finally, I assure you the calculations for kernel boot-file-set sizes (180M with Nvidia GPU) are correct for 20.04, and will be correct for 22.04 unless the compression technique has been changed. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect this size to grow to 200M or more over the next 2 years. Also, the headroom + safety factor specified (10 kernel file-sets total) is reasonable when you consider that systems that reboot less frequently will accumulate kernels and that a single upgrade can install multiple additional kernel images. Sincerely, Mike
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