[CentOS] heads up: /boot space on kernel upgrade

Thu Feb 11 18:19:40 UTC 2016
Devin Reade <gdr at gno.org>

I have a CentOS 6 machine that was initially installed as CentOS 6.4
in May of 2013.  It's /boot filesystem is 200M which, IIRC, was the
default /boot size at the time.

The most recent kernel update (2.6.32-573.18.1.el6) fails because of
lack of space in /boot. The workaround is edit /etc/yum.conf, reduce
installonly_limit from 5 to something lower (I used 3), remove the
oldest kernel via 'rpm -e', and then re-apply the update.  In this case,
it was necessary to use the 'yum update' command line vs the Update Applet
due to an incomplete transaction from the failed update.

Devin