Removing Old Kernels from /boot

Serge Y. Stroobandt

Copyright 2013–2016, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

Introduction

Having a separate /boot partition different from the root partition may offer the advantage of faster booting, especially on spinning hard drives. Such a /boot partition is typically anywhere between 100 and 500MB in size. –I certainly prefer 500MB whenever possible.– However, there is also a disadvantage to this. As you keep your system up-to-date with upgrades, new kernels are installed while older kernels remain in place. If you are not careful, kernel images may eventually threaten to entirely fill up the /boot partition.

Kernel version

First, check which kernel version you are currently running. It should be the latest kernel.

$ uname -r

Removing obsolete kernels

In Debian-derived distributions, removing obsolete kernels is really easy. The apt-get autoremove command will in most cases remove all but the two most recent kernels from a crammed /boot partition.

$ sudo apt-get autoremove

Manually purging kernels

It may happen that an installed kernel may no longer be removed by means of apt-get autoremove. This occurs when an older kernel version is no longer listed in the repository of a rolling Debian release. In such a case, you will need to purge the obsolete kernel manually.

$ sudo apt-get purge linux-headers-version-arch linux-image-version-arch
$ sudo rm \boot\*-version-arch
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

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