On Mon, 2025-09-22 at 10:49 -0600, home user via users wrote: > Here we go again. > another "overloaded" term in the IT profession? > I've been using the term "kernel" loosely and in a general way. I'm > using it incorrectly? > What is the correct understanding of "kernel" in the context of this > part of this thread (trying to estimate how much space to allocate for > the "kernel"... > current "kernel" + "rescue" + 5 old "kernels" + space for future > "kernel" growth... > when doing installation)? > ... or maybe I should ask what term I should use?
Once again, you should be thinking about the root filesystem, not the kernel. Without going into a long digression about operating system architecture, the kernel is the basic memory-resident privileged software that has direct access to the hardware, including its various peripherals, and has to be there to get anything done. It's the first thing to run after the system has booted (which is a whole other discussion - see 'man bootup' for an excruciatingly detailed explanation). All user-level programs and libraries run on top of it, including your desktop environment, most autonomous daemons (services) and so on. It's usual to have more than one kernel image (file on the disk) in case of wanting to roll back, but only one of them can ever be in use at any given moment. To get anything useful done, the kernel needs a lot of auxiliary software and configuration files. Broadly speaking, these are all part of the root filesystem, so that's the amount of space you need to think about. Or in fact, not think about, because frankly any modern PC is going to have more than enough space for you not to worry about this, and if you use the default Fedora Workstation setup with BTRFS the use of subvolumes makes the question pretty much moot. Assuming you aren't doing anything very out of the ordinary, you're probably best just going with the defaults. Install the system on your fastest disk (probably an SSD) where there's likely to be enough space for /home as well. If that's not enough, adding more disks is a separate topic but is not difficult. poc -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
