F43 Emergency Change Proposal / Acceptance: 2G /boot partition (System-Wide Change)

Project Discussion Change Proposals
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This is an unusual combination of late Change proposal and acceptance for Fedora 43 that has been decided by FESCo. Per that decision, this Change is proposed and immediately accepted.

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Summary

Raise the default boot partition size from 1 GiB to 2 GiB.

Owner

Detailed Description

This Change raises the default /boot partition size to 2.0 GiB across all configurations. This includes Anaconda, kiwi-built images, and osbuild-made images that use a separate /boot volume.

Feedback

Pre-proposal devel@ mailing list discussion thread.

Benefit to Fedora

Firmware is getting bigger, initramfs are getting bigger, and boot volume size is not getting bigger. The last time it was changed from 500 MB to 1 GB was 2016.

The motive for the change is having a big enough boot on new clean Fedora 43 installations so they can be upgraded for 5 years.

We have no policy or guideline about how long a system should be upgradeable in place. But 5 years sounds nice, rather than telling folks a) become a partition ninja, or b) reinstall.

Scope

  • Proposal owners:

  • Other developers: Merge and release changes.

  • Release engineering: #12996

  • Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

  • Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

  • Alignment with the Fedora Strategy: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Existing systems are not impacted by this Change, but the need for increasing the /boot partition does not change for existing systems. A reinstall may be desirable for this case.

How To Test

Once this change lands, testing this is as simple as going through a regular install of any Fedora deliverable.

User Experience

There should be no user experience impact.

Dependencies

  • anaconda
  • any osbuild package that uses osbuild/images as a dependency

Contingency Plan

  • Contingency mechanism: Revert pull requests and make new release
  • Contingency deadline: Final Freeze
  • Blocks release? Yes

Documentation

N/A

Release Notes

Fedora Linux 43 has raised the size of the default /boot partition to 2 GiB. This is to accommodate increases in boot data over the past several releases and to maintain a usable experience. Users of older releases may be advised to consider reinstalling instead of upgrading to increase the /boot partition size.

Last edited by @adamwill 2025-10-06T23:14:44Z

Last edited by @adamwill 2025-10-06T23:14:44Z

3 Likes
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How do you feel about the proposal as written?

  • Strongly in favor
  • In favor, with reservations
  • Neutral
  • Opposed, but could be convinced
  • Strongly opposed
0 voters

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2 Likes
3

Small question about this: Does GPU drivers/firmwares have to be bundled into the initramfs? From what I can tell that is where the increases come from.

Would loading in only simpledrm for early-boot works well enough to allow shaving the extra weight from various GPU drivers/firmwares? IIRC plymouth already works with it.

4

In more complicated configurations you need the firmware so that the needed display(s) can be used at boot.

Here is a blog post talking about some of the cases: Captcha Check

The only “quick” answer (for F43) is increase the size of the partition.

2 Likes
5

In case anyone else is unable to access the blog, here’s a mirror in the Wayback Archive.

6

It is a good proposal and decision, we have had a number if people on these forums with this problem.

7

It would be better to give the simplest instructions to expand the partition. Reinstalling can be long and complex for established users.

1 Like
8

I am unaware of any simple set of instructions that would work reliably for all the flexibility Fedora has allowed for past installations. Could you provide such a set of instructions?

1 Like
9

That only exists if users’ installations don’t contain some more complex partition schemes, like LVM or full disk encryption.

1 Like
10

Those with these issues are not helped by this proposal at all. It only avoids the issue for new installations by people who are unaware (and only for as long as 2GB is enough).

Those who ran into a problem and have no way out but to reinstall can always ask anaconda for a bigger /boot. Changing the /boot size in anaconda is the least problem they have when they indeed need to reinstall.

11

As I’ve just had to recently reinstall to increase the size of my /boot, this is great change.

12

What is causing this enormous bloat in the initramfs file in the /boot partition? I have one of those systems with the default 0.5GB /boot partition size, and I’ve always had to manually delete the old version of the OS before installing a new one (not enough room for 3 versions), because of the size of the new one. Since the latest “dnf upgrade” on my Fedora 41 system, I will no longer even survive doing that because of the abrupt jump in size of the initramfs. So what caused this abrupt 80% increase in initramfs size on as old a release as F41? An explanation for this huge increase would be much appreciated, because I certainly didn’t need it in earlier patches of the OS, so why do I need it now (especially with the associated growth in vmlinuz)?

One would hope it’s not kernel-based spyware or marketware.

1 Like
13

Note I just did a cpio -i –list –verbose on the two initramfs files, and they show exactly the same listing. So apparently there is some baggage attached after the cpio file. Here’s these results:

# ls -l /boot/initramfs-6*

-rw-------. 1 root root 94666876 May 17 21:30 /boot/initramfs-6.14.6-200.fc41.x86_64.img
-rw-------. 1 root root 167116517 Oct 8 10:09 /boot/initramfs-6.16.10-100.fc41.x86_64.img

# cpio -i --list --verbose </boot/initramfs-6.16.10-100.fc41.x86_64.img
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug 20 20:00 .
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 2 Aug 20 20:00 early_cpio
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug 20 20:00 kernel
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug 20 20:00 kernel/x86
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug 20 20:00 kernel/x86/microcode
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 100684 Aug 20 20:00 kernel/x86/microcode/AuthenticAMD.bin
199 blocks

cpio -i --list --verbose </boot/initramfs-6.14.6-200.fc41.x86_64.img

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Nov 26 2024 .
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 2 Nov 26 2024 early_cpio
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Nov 26 2024 kernel
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Nov 26 2024 kernel/x86
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Nov 26 2024 kernel/x86/microcode
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 100684 Nov 26 2024 kernel/x86/microcode/AuthenticAMD.bin
199 blocks

15

Absolutely. This will also be important if Fedora decides to one day ship the longterm kernel by default, as many distros ship it alongside the “stable” kernel

1 Like
16

Use lsinitrd to see what’s in an initrd. The difference is likely the NVIDIA 570 firmware files, if your system has an NVIDIA adapter. That was added to F41 in the kernel 6.15.3 update; I guess that version of the kernel expects that version of the firmware, Peter would know more.

17

Would these changes be already in place for those of us looking to install the F43 Beta before F43 is released?

18

No, it’s not on the beta as this emergency change came after the beta release however you can use the 1.6 Release Candidate which will pretty much what you will see on final on Tuesday. See here: Index of /pub/alt/stage/43_RC-1.6

5 Likes
19

That’s brilliant, thank you for sharing that link.

I’ll make an installation media over the weekend while I still have the time :wink:

20

Thanks for the link. :slight_smile:

21

This is not likely to ever happen.

1 Like