Enlarge boot partition during or after installation

1

Hello community,

I use IPFire on an APU1D4 and have received a message since some core updates that the boot partition only has 9% free space. With the update to Core 142, the memory was reduced to 0%, so I set up IPFire again and changed from the i586 version to the x86_64 version.

When I see some of the other threads, the problem is not new and occurs in various forms, from individual partitions to the entire hard drive.

After I wanted to switch from i586 to x86_64 anyway and use the entire hard disk space, the reinstallation was inevitable this time. I would like to build for the future.

I do not plan to load IPFire with many add-ons, only the WLAN access point is mandatory, so I would have liked to have enlarged the boot partition significantly during installation.
Question: Is there a way to change the partition size during installation e.g. to be passed to the installation routings via a parameter?

After installation, the partitions should only be changed via a second live system, e.g. GParted may be possible. Has anyone ever tried this successfully or are there stumbling blocks for “sometime linux user”?

Thanks for your support.
Best regards
Sören

2

WLAN takes neglibible space on boot partition, so the default 124 MB in new installation should be fine.

There is no way to change the size of any partition during install from pre-compiled IPFire.

If you really want to fiddle, then GParted works reliably enough, but would have to move the / partition, which can take a long time and be more risk.

3

Hello Rodney Peters,

Thank you for your answer.

When installing it in December 2016, I also thought that it would be enough, just 3.5 years later I had to find out that 100MB /boot are not enough.

110MB was used for /boot during the new installation. Where do the 124MB come from?

4

124 MB (not MiB) is now standard size for /boot on i586 & ARM. I think you will find that is what is reported by “lsblk” from CLI.

Status > Media from GUI appears to be reporting MiB (121 M on i586). Free space should still be quite adequate.

5

Normal even the i586 installtion with additional PAE kernel should still fit on the old layout with 64MB bootpartition.
If you run out of space and use a xfs partition create /.forcefsck and reboot to run a filesystem check.

On fresh x64_64 installations the partition is 128MB and 40MB used.

6

64MB looks unworkable for PAE.

disk_usage-PAE
disk_usage-PAE710×403 78.8 KB

I anticipate that a new, non-PAE kernel would be added during some core upgrades, before either of the existing kernel are removed, which would certainly run out of disk space.

7

A core update always remove all kernel files before installing. I still have the 64MB layout on my i586 backup machine and it works yet.

https://git.ipfire.org/?p=ipfire-2.x.git;a=blob;f=config/rootfiles/core/142/update.sh;h=e46bdf2ea74948eee76e09a3f9c1b3b7a11549aa;hb=70af65df4198c58f99a333748faa39b39ad1c3c4

And if there is not enough space it will not install the pae kernel.
If you get a warning that this fails you should resize the partition with a livelinux and gparted.

8

The core of my question is actually answered.
Nevertheless, I find it interesting that there are different memory layouts.

ipfire

9

The layout has changed from time to time. The first IPFire installations had only 20MB bootpartitions. But keep in mind that IPFire 2.1 was released on 8. Nov 2007.

The layout has changed many times and it is also depending on the Size of the HDD (larger than 3TB needs GPT instead of MBR partitioning …) also the support of EFI was added later…