[kwlug-disc] Removing old Linux images on upgrade

B.S. bs27975 at yahoo.ca
Thu Dec 3 22:02:40 EST 2015


I believe I have recently started seeing the same.

I had/have an alias, recently changed because of this: alias aptup='aptitude update ; aptitude upgrade ; aptitude upgrade ; apt-get autoremove'

- the second aptitude upgrade was to catch / kick in aptitude's auto-remove if the first upgraded something such that there was something auto-removable now.

I can't say with certainty that adding the apt-get autoremove has since caught anything. (Largely because I can't be certain the conditions have reoccurred that caused me to add it in the first place.)

Reality check me: if you run apt-get autoremove, does it offer to do anything?

I know I ran into this on 14.04LTS when I played with linux-generic-lts-vivid - the pre-vivid kernel versions kept mounting up. Or rather, I couldn't remember if that many pre-vivid kernels had already piled up (and why were they when I set somewhere to keep at most 3 versions). I ended up googling and removing the prior versions manually.

I don't remember where the number of versions to keep gets set (/etc/default/grub?), but I remember wondering why there were so many. I also remember wondering if playing with the vivid kernels broke the setting.

I think I also ran into the problem a long time ago when I played with the real time kernel - which seems gone / deprecated now. Think linux-image-generic-pae running on top of linux-image-generic. (Such seem acretive, not 'replacive'.)

If I understood your prior correctly, it seemed you were saying you had multiple vm's sharing the same /boot. (By you I mean your hosting provider.) Is it possible the vm's are using different kernels and so keeping versions current to them around? Not that I think disparate vm's have knowledge of other vm's to know to keep old versions around - but I wonder if that keep at most X versions around setting gets turned off in such use case.

Sorry I don't have a better answer for you, but perhaps something here will trigger something that leads you to an answer.

- I also remember turning on auto-apply security updates at some point. I wonder if doing so disables the keep X versions around setting. (At install, some long while ago, it seemed to me auto-apply security updates interfered with non-security update notifications. Or something.)

>________________________________
> From: Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com>
>To: KWLUG discussion <kwlug-disc at kwlug.org> 
>Sent: Thursday, December 3, 2015 9:10 PM
>Subject: Re: [kwlug-disc] Removing old Linux images on upgrade
> 
>After multiple upgrades, I am not asked if I want to move the old images. Sometimes I am, sometimes no. Inconsistent.





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