I have a 500MB boot partition, and I keep only the linux and linux-lts kernels.

Recently I see that the partition only has about 23Mb free.

Is there some recent change which increased the kernel’s size significantly?

  • Yardy Sardley
    16•11 months ago

    Check which linux-firmware-* packages you have installed. Arch recently split the linux firmware into a bunch of separate packages, and made the old package depend on pretty much all of them. So unless you already knew about this and uninstalled the packages you don’t need, you likely have a bunch of unnecessary firmware stuffed into your fallback initramfs.

    • @spacemanspiffy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4•11 months ago

      I thought I removed linux-firmware-nvidia but I guess not.

      sudo pacman -R linux-firmware
sudo pacman -Rns linux-firmware-nvidia

      This did the trick, thank you! Cut my fallback.img sizes almost in half!

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
    15•11 months ago

    That’s mine.

    Stock kernel (only custom loader entries), using systemd-boot. No LTS kernel installed. I assume for LTS this will more or less double.

  • @unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de
    4•11 months ago

    I had the same issue, breaking the update, and the solution was something along the lines of:

    1. Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf
    2. Change MODULES=most to MODULES=dep
    3. Update initramfs:
      sudo update-initramfs -u

    Although I think the cleanest way is to do it with an override config file in initramfs.conf.d, but do a bit of research on this.

    I guess that by not including all modules, there is a risk the program forgets one of the modules you needed, but so far it works for me, and images are now a lot lighter.

    • @Starkon@lemmy.ml
      3•11 months ago

      hello, do you mean editing the MODULES in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf? since afaik and after searching in the arch wiki and in the arch packages, I couldn’t find mention of update-initramfs or /etc/initramfs-tools. This wiki page edits /etc/mkinitcpio.conf.

  • Strit
    2•11 months ago

    I think the initramfs has gotten a lot bigger over the last couple of years. More modules included, more functionality.

        • @spacemanspiffy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          5•11 months ago

          I think there is probably truth to that, but I don’t think its impacting the size of my initramfs in any significant way.

      • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤEnglish
        -6•11 months ago

        I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t. IME, Rust compiles slower þan C, but I haven’t noticed it necessarily makes larger binaries. Þe timing is suspicious, but may be unrelated.