confusion about pre upgrade and /boot partition

[Rick Stevens]

Scott Robbins wrote:
> I tried to run pre upgrade today and got an error message that my /boot
> partition was too small.  The message that it could download the file
> during installation if I had an ethernet connection. 
> 
> Rather than go through the whole thing, I stopped it and began to google
> and to bugzilla, if there is such a word.  
> 
> The impression I am getting is that it will eventually fail if the /boot
> partition is too small.  My /boot partition is about 100 MB or so.  I
> removed all older kernels and left the minimum in there.  However, more
> googling indicated the image it will need is actually over 100 MB. 
> 
> So, I am not sure if it would eventually fail or not if I try to go the
> preupgrade route.  This was from an F10 install, which probably had a
> default /boot of 100, but I could be wrong about that, I'm not sure if I
> manually did the partitioning or not.  
> 
> If that is correct, I wonder if it would better to have a more emphatic
> message--the message was a bit ambiguous to me, not really stating if it
> would fail later, even if the image is downloaded, if the /boot
> partition is too small. 
> 
> I only gave it about 5 minutes on google, so stopped after the first few
> hits, many of which were older, so I'm not sure if this is still the
> case or not.  
> 
> Thanks for any clarification. 

The issue may be not that /boot is too small, but that you're using
/ (the root filesystem) for everything _including_ /boot.  In that
case, yup, you're going to run out of space PDQ (pretty damned quick).
On my laptop, for instance:

	[rick at golem3 ~]$ df -h
	Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
	/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
          	              76G   41G   31G  58% /
	/dev/sda3              92M   30M   58M  34% /boot
	tmpfs                1002M   76K 1002M   1% /dev/shm

Note that /boot and / are separate partitions, /boot is only 92MB
and that it's still 56% empty.

You can have /boot as part of the root filesystem if you want, but
you'll have to make sure the root filesystem is a type grub groks (and
that's ext2 or ext3 only at this time).  It can't be on an LVM volume
(as mine is) or be on something esoteric like a software RAID or XFS
filesystem, since the kernel has to be running to access those.

Remember that /boot only has to have enough space to hold the grub
loader stage 1.5 and stage 2 loaders, the grub.conf file, the kernel(s)
you plan to boot and their accompanying initrd images.  That's it.  /
(the root filesystem) has to have enough space to hold the kernel's
modules, system libraries and the stuff in /etc, /sbin and /bin.

So, take a careful look at the partition table again.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer                      ricks at nerd.com -
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