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Comment by jml78 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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