[CentOS] hacking grub to control number of retained kernels.

Sat Sep 3 02:52:05 UTC 2016
Fred Smith <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us>

I've recently had this problem on two C7 systems, wherein when doing "yum
update", I get a warning about /boot being low on space.

both systems were installed using the partition size recommended by
Anaconda, right now "df -h" shows /boot as 494M, with 79M free.

I don't store unrelated crap on /boot, I assume that yum and/or grub
will manage it for me. So, why, after over a year, is it running low
on space on two different systems?

Is there some location in /boot where junk piles up, but shouldn't,
that I have to know about so I can clean it out?

I see EIGHT initramfs files in /boot, two per kernel, same name but
one has a kdump just before the .img suffix. do I need those for old
kernels that I may or may not ever boot? (they're 30 to 50 MB each).

For the moment I've edited /etc/grub.conf and changed installonly_limit
from 4 to 3. (related question: do I need to manually remove the
oldest kernel, having done this, or will yum/grub clean it up the
next time there's a kernel to install?)

thanks!

Fred
-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
                       I can do all things through Christ 
                              who strengthens me.
------------------------------ Philippians 4:13 -------------------------------