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Comment by gavinsyancey | Hacker News Reader

My /boot partition is 256MB because that was the default in the Ubuntu installer way back when I installed it. I can't easily resize it because my primary partition starts right after it. I am constantly running out of space in /boot because Apt doesn't fully clean up after old kernel versions automatically. An extra 20-30MB (per kernel version, at least) is absolutely a huge deal.

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You can resize your primary partition, move it to a larger offset, then resize /boot. You can also move /boot to the end of your disk. gparted supports this stuff pretty well.

There's no way. You cannot just relocate a Linux partition while it's running like you can macOS, unless gparted somehow supports moving a live system into a tmpfs while the operation is performed.

Windows software that does this has to completely reboot into a dedicated executable that does the work before the system is actually started.

Not while it's running obviously... you boot into gparted live and do it.

And btw, yes you can move partitions while linux is running.

> you boot into gparted live and do it.

This is not the same as simply running gparted from the partition to be resized.

> And btw, yes you can move partitions while linux is running.

Not your root partition, unless you can manage to unmount it without having a fatal system crash.

> This is not the same as simply running gparted from the partition to be resized.

Nobody said you have to run it from that filesystem/partition?

> Not your root partition, unless you can manage to unmount it without having a fatal system crash.

You can resize your root partition using fdisk/partprobe without unmounting it, then move /boot to be after root.

I'm sure there are many other ways to do it as well (pivot_root, etc).

You just need to run off a live distro to do it.

That's my point. You can't just download and run gparted to resize your root partition, you need to boot from somewhere else in order to do that.

Is it really that hard to boot from external media on the odd occasion of doing stuff like this?

No, no it's not.

You can also set up gparted live to be bootable from GRUB from the same drive.

That's true, it's not uncommon for me to install Linux by flashing the installer to a small partition on the same disk as the actual install destination. Quite useful for dual/triple-boot without actually requiring any USB flash drives.

Ubuntu is configured that way. Most other apt-based systems are configured correctly.

I moved my /boot to a USB thumb drive when I ended up in a similar situation.

Perhaps Ubuntu and its derivatives but mine (now Mint) has been removing the fourth kernel for probably five years.

May need to run autoremove (haha) however.

I swear Debian only keeps two versions ie current and the previous. Is keeping four a Ubuntu thing?

Keeps three and when the fourth arrives the oldest gets the heave-ho. Probably configurable.

I am in the same boat as you. I still haven’t found a solution for keeping it clean in an automated and safe way.

However, you could consider shrinking your main partition using gparted live. Then put a new /boot at the end. Of course, you'd lose the original /boot partition space, however.

Why not just use gparted to move the partition instead? Just three steps

1. Shrink the main partition 2. Move the main partition to the right, leaving free space between it and /boot 3. Resize /boot to fit into the newly freed space

That's what I did at one point to make my /boot 2gb or so, haven't had issues since.

Yes, that works, but I didn't suggest it because it's riskier and takes way longer.

The whole filesystem has to be moved, instead of just the excess data.

Although this is usually successful, my advice would be: don't have a power outage if you're moving the whole filesystem.

Does moving the main partition like that have potential weirdness with some filesystems, or does this gparted approach rewrite the entire partition to a new (offset) location?

I've never ran into anything weird, since it moves the whole partition's address rather than the filesystem within the partition or anything like that.

I don't know if any tools support moving partitions, but you can use "dd" to move a partition backwards if you are very careful. I'm not recommending this on any system that you don't have good backups for, but it is possible.

gparted supports this and it's relatively easy to do after shrinking the original partition

NixOS

I run out of space on /boot semi-regularly on one of my nixos machines; if anything, I would argue that it's worse at handling the situation if you don't regularly delete old generations

It does that on its own, set a reasonable limit on generations and enable auto gc.

You can still create and use an XBOOTLDR partition.

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