Upgrade to F44, little space on /boot/efi

Ask Fedora
,
1

My Laptop shares F43 with Windows 11:

Operating System: Fedora Linux 43
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.25.0
Qt Version: 6.10.3
Kernel Version: 6.19.14-200.fc43.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 22 × Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 155H
Memory: 64 GiB of RAM (62.3 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: Mesa Intel® Arc
Graphics Processor 2: zink Vulkan 1.4
Manufacturer: LENOVO
Product Name: 21KS002EMZ
System Version: ThinkPad P16s Gen 3

Windows created a really small efi partition (100MB) and looks like this currently:

1.8M    EFI/Boot
18M     EFI/fedora
19M     EFI/Microsoft

So both Fedora and Windows occupy about the same amount of space. I wonder however if the remaining is enough for a F44 upgrade. I keep only two kernel, my /etc/dnf/dnf.conf:

# see `man dnf.conf` for defaults and possible options

[main]
installonly_limit=2

Will the upgrade check for space availability?

2

The kernels would be installed into the /boot file system and not in /boot/efi, so the upgrade would not require more space in /boot/efi.

2 Likes
3

That is good to know.

I ran in a situation on a minor upgrade that did complain about out of space on a boot device, but cannot remember which one it was. After reducing the kernels I was able to do an kernel update.

But frankly I’m not sure what really was to cause.

├─/boot /dev/nvme0n1p6
│ │            ext4   rw,relatime,seclabel
│ └─/boot/efi
│       /dev/nvme0n1p1
│              vfat   rw,relatime,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=winnt,errors=remount-ro

/dev/nvme0n1p6                    2.0G  1.4G  458M  75% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p1                     96M   38M   59M  40% /boot/efi

It might have actually been the /boot where the 2GB was totally my doing and had nothing to do with windows.

4

Hi,

Just to confirm:

On Fedora, kernel and kernel-core files are installed under /boot, not /boot/efi.

By default, Fedora keeps the last three kernel versions, which allows booting into an older kernel if needed. This is intentional: kernel packages are installed alongside existing ones rather than replaced, providing a built-in fallback in case of issues with a newer kernel.

I verified this on Fedora 43:

rpm -ql kernel-core-6.19.14-200.fc43.x86_64
/boot/.vmlinuz-6.19.14-200.fc43.x86_64.hmac
/boot/System.map-6.19.14-200.fc43.x86_64
/boot/config-6.19.14-200.fc43.x86_64
/boot/initramfs-6.19.14-200.fc43.x86_64.img
/boot/symvers-6.19.14-200.fc43.x86_64.xz
/boot/vmlinuz-6.19.14-200.fc43.x86_64
…

And from the filesystem layout:

  • /boot contains kernels, initramfs, and related files
  • /boot/efi contains only EFI data (bootloader, firmware entries, etc.)

Even though I haven’t upgraded to Fedora 44 yet (I usually wait a few weeks as a precaution), I would expect the same behavior there.

Regards
G/T