On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 10:47:59PM -0800, Michael Mikowski wrote: > Hi Everyone: > > Aaron: On an encrypted Ubuntu system, the EFI partition mounted on > /boot/efi is 512M too. But here we are talking about the /boot partition > which is distinct. It is typically 705M and formatted with ext4, although > subsequent released will likely be larger. The question here is by how much. > > We have offered this suggestion as means to move a proven solution > component upstream for the benefit of everyone using 22.04. We implemented > an enlarged /boot partition and improved kernel management and cleaning > over a year ago because our customers needed it. See the support cost > calculations below about why we moved quickly when this became an issue. We > expected to see much more of if we didn't take action. The problem was made > more urgent by a packagekit bug. > > Using an additional 0.5% (1.295G costing < $0.25) of a 250G NVMe drive is a > very small price to pay to help avoid a catastrophic failure mode from > which most users cannot recover.
When interviewing candidates for positions at Canonical I've had the opportunity to speak to Ubuntu users from around the world. Sometimes these are people who installed Ubuntu on whatever system they had lying around and they weren't in a position to buy a new PC or drive. So while the additional space in /boot might cost $0.25 for you, the cost for other people may be much greater. When developing Ubuntu we need to take into consideration the fact that our users are located in a variety of different countries and subsequently have access to different resources. > And users *do* install multiple kernels images for many legitimate and > exploratory reasons, and this *does* cause full disks on the default > partition size. If people are doing this, and the OS allows it (and it > should), then how can it not be a supported use case? A consequence of Ubuntu being open and customizable is that users can do many things that are not ones that we endorse. > Should we remove safety belts from cars because we arbitrarily decide that > braking hard is not a supported use case? Where are Ubuntu's supported use > cases, DFMEAs, and KPCs available for review? > > Compare the cost of $0.25 disk space versus the cost helping one novice > user recover an overfull /boot partition. This can easily exceed $200 in > direct support and lost productivity. That's 800 *times* more expensive. > Worse, if the user can't find help expert-level assistance, they are highly > motivated to abandon Ubuntu altogether. > > If Ubuntu is for everyone, then we should be catering to the vast majority > to whom the $0.25 of disk space doesn't matter. These users also often lack > the deep skill set to recover from this failure mode. Conversely, the tiny > fraction who want to optimize /boot size are those best equipped to do so - > they are typically on a much smaller disk and are creating custom > installations for things like embedded or edge systems. The installer is no > impediment for these professionals. > > We could continue discussing minutia about why this may or may not be a > good idea, however, I believe the cost / benefit analysis above is highly > convincing. We are confident from experience that a 2G /boot partition is a > very good choice that works with best practice for all common and readable > use cases. A quick web search also shows this size is frequently > recommended by other experienced desktop Linux users. We are all in agreement that the /boot partition size needs / needed increasing. For us to move forward in the discussion about increasing it to 2G it would really help for you to answer my previous questions regarding the use cases for having multiple kernels installed. Those questions were in the following email: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2022-February/041856.html Cheers, -- Brian Murray -- ubuntu-devel mailing list ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
