On 2021-07-03 18:12, Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Sat, Jul 03, 2021 at 05:50:44PM +0100, mick crane wrote:
I did think that modules are for the kernel to interact with hardware.
There is for example "dell_smm_hwmon" followed "0" which you'd think
was to
be used by software for monitoring the PC hardware.
Use modinfo(8) to learn what a module does, or at least a very brief
description of it.
In this case:
unicorn:~$ modinfo dell_smm_hwmon
filename:
/lib/modules/5.10.0-7-amd64/kernel/drivers/hwmon/dell-smm-hwmon.ko
alias: i8k
license: GPL
description: Dell laptop SMM BIOS hwmon driver
[...]
I know, it's not a lot.
This is definitely a PC so this must be the installer thinking it might
be a laptop.
I looked because "apt upgrade" failed to install things in /boot
because no
room left. I deleted the oldest kernel stuff of the 3 there and "apt
upgrade" worked.
I was thinking then to remove the unwanted modules to make the kernels
smaller.
Modules are sitting on disk waiting to be loaded into memory if they're
needed.
lsmod shows the ones that are currently loaded into memory.
Removing one from memory with rmmod(8) or an equivalent will not reduce
the amount of disk space they take up. All it will do is free a tiny
bit of RAM, and sacrifice the functionality being provided by the
module.
If disk space is a serious issue for you, rmmod(8) will not help.
this is after <cough> deleting the very oldest.
root@pumpkin:/boot# ls -la
total 148944
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 1024 Jul 3 16:53 .
drwxr-xr-x 20 root root 4096 Jul 3 16:45 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 236065 Apr 9 19:17 config-5.10.0-6-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 236188 May 28 09:31 config-5.10.0-7-amd64
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 1024 Jul 3 16:45 grub
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 68868137 Jul 1 16:17 initrd.img-5.10.0-6-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 68909875 Jul 3 16:53 initrd.img-5.10.0-7-amd64
drwx------ 2 root root 12288 Nov 21 2020 lost+found
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 83 Apr 9 19:17 System.map-5.10.0-6-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 83 May 28 09:31 System.map-5.10.0-7-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6824192 Apr 9 19:17 vmlinuz-5.10.0-6-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6818304 May 28 09:31 vmlinuz-5.10.0-7-amd64
root@pumpkin:/boot# du -h /boot
12K /boot/lost+found
2.1M /boot/grub/i386-pc
2.3M /boot/grub/fonts
4.3M /boot/grub/locale
11M /boot/grub
157M /boot
root@pumpkin:/boot# df -h /boot
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 236M 159M 65M 71% /boot
Can I not *just* move the older ones out of the way so upgrade doesn't
run out of space ?
mick
--
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