How to clean up full /boot safely?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 10 Feb 2018 22:26:23 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>On Sat, 10 Feb 2018 21:03:05 +0000, Colin Law wrote:
>>On 10 February 2018 at 20:55, Ralf Mardorf <silver.bullet at zoho.com>
>>wrote:  
>>> On Sat, 10 Feb 2018 21:50:52 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:    
>>>>On Sat, 10 Feb 2018 20:41:05 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:    
>>>>>Memo to self for next installation: partition manually and create a
>>>>>separate /boot, /home, and /    
>>>>
>>>>Actually you would avoid the OP's issue by not seperating /boot
>>>>from /. The issue is caused by a seperated /boot partition and an
>>>>assumed size    
>>>           ^usually    
>>>>that is idiotic, if somebody should need to install many
>>>>kernels.    
>>>
>>> Sure, even / including /boot, could be too small, but usually this
>>> issue is related to a too small separated /boot partition, resp. to
>>> users how don't know how to handle kernel upgrades, since just a
>>> minority needs many installed kernels.    
>>
>>The problem arises if you have small /boot partition and do not
>>remember to run apt autoremove occasionally to remove the old ones.  
>
>Indeed, but there actually is no plausible reason for GRUB users to
>seperate /boot from /. For this majority of users, it makes much more
>sense to make /boot part of /, since they would get rid of the need to
>estimate potentially needed space for /boot. Actually I'm a syslinux
>user, so seperating /boot from / makes much sense, regarding a weekness
>of the syslinux bootloader (JFTR off-topic, apart from this weekness,
>there are advantages when chosing syslinux over GRUB, but those are
>irrelevant for this thread).

PS, before you asked:

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ cat /mnt/moonstudio/etc/fstab 
#<file system>                             <mount point>  <type> <options>  <dump pass>
/dev/sdb11                                  /              ext4   rw,relatime       0 1
/dev/sda10                                  none           swap   sw                0 0
/dev/sdb7                                   none           swap   sw                0 0
/dev/sda9                                   /mnt/archlinux ext4   defaults,relatime 0 2
/dev/sdb5                                   /mnt/winos7    ext4   defaults,relatime 0 2
/mnt/archlinux/.boot/ubuntu_moonstudio/boot /boot          none   bind              0 0

If you wouldn't bind the mount point, syslinux would require
chainloading. In this regard and probably a few others, GRUB is better
than syslinux. Anyway, in my experiences GRUB has got a lot of more
pitfalls, than syslinux has got. YMMV!