Been running Fedora for quite a long time and never ran into this before.
the dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=42 is failing due to lack of space on /
I have 16G for / and /usr which is under / is at 12G
I have plenty of disk space available on other drives and I can move things around, but I had some bad experiences when specific filesystems are not mounted under / so I don’t know what to do here. According to the latest errors I need 3G and I only have 1.8G left.
Please let me know how I can resolve this. Thank you,
Bill
edit: it appears there is an option for dnf to download the packages to an alternate directory, but the manpage is confusing to me. If anybody knows the magic sauce that would be great.
When moving “system” directory trees you want to boot from another drive, usually a “Live USB Installer”. Back when drives were much smaller than they are now I often had to move bloated trees like /usr/local because “mission critical” software needed specific compilers and libraries not available from the distro. It was not hard to move the tree to another drive and the replace it with a symbolic link. Before making such changes it can be important to check for “hidden files”: usually application crashes that left big output files with file or directory names beginning with a . . Since colleagues worked with similar base configurations, it was easy to see when some directory was using an unusual amount of space.
You haven’t mentioned your filesystem. Modern filesystems like btrfs use a “storage pool” and you can just add space from another drive to the pool for your system.
In the past when certain directories were not physical subdirectories of / it caused problems. I don’t remember it was Linux or the various BSD UNIX I run.
I have enough disk space and I know how to move directories. I don’t know if moving /usr to its own mount point will break dnf system-upgrade.
Anyway, there seems to be some option or options to download the packages to a different directory but I tried a few commands and dnf didn’t like the syntax.
If anybody has experience with that feature of dnf, that would help in my case where I have plenty of room on other drives on the box.
--downloaddir=<path>
Redirect download of packages to provided <path>. By default, packages are downloaded into (per repository created)
subdirectories of /var/lib/dnf/system-upgrade.
For dnf5 the download directory is var/lib/dnf/offline/ anyway. But F41 is too old for me to investigate further.
Unknown argument “–downloaddir=/var/packages” for command “dnf5”
I cannot determine where the default command downloads packages, but it is not in /var since my /var has more than 500G available.
It seems the packages are downloaded somewhere under / in a filesystem which I don’t have on a seperate mountpoint and drive, unlike /var and /tmp which I have separate drives for.
Is there a command to determine where
dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=42 is saving the packages?
in the last post in the thread, Garrett Mitchener says:
“I’m upgrading some machines from Fedora 41 to 42. Running dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=42 today, I discovered that RPMs are now being stored in /usr/lib/sysimage/libdnf5/offline/packages/ which is different from where they used to go. I’m guessing this is a change made going from DNF version 4 to 5.”
Seems to me an extremely poor choice of package download target. But now my upgrade is proceeding after I moved the existing sysimage directory to my /var and symlinked it from /usr/lib
I remeber that, “/var/lib/dnf/system-upgrade” was changed to /usr/? (Fedora 44). I don’t know why, but ln -s is still working. Yes, it is workaround, but…
That date indicates it was upgraded from f43 to f44 while f44 was still branched and over a month before it was released on April 28. Thus changes within the f44 release would not have taken place yet.
But you do realize that the download takes place while still running F42/43, right?
I think the reason while the files were not removed is quite simple. I may have set keepcache=1 to prevent cache from being accidentally cleared while I was resolving potential conflicts that were preventing the ugrade.
What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense.. You pointed out that I upgraded to F44 while in beta. How would that have changed following the general release of F44?