this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
9 points (100.0% liked)

Pop!_OS (Linux)

5062 readers
1 users here now

Pop!_OS is an operating system developed by System76 for STEM and creative professionals who use their computer as a tool to discover and create. Unleash your potential on secure, reliable open source software. Based on your exceptional curiosity, we sense you have a lot of it.

Unleash your potential

Whether this is your first experience with Linux, or your latest adventure, all are welcome to discuss and ask questions about Pop!_OS and COSMIC. Keep the discussions friendly though, and remember to assume good intentions whenever you reply. We're all here because we have a shared love for Linux and open source software.

System76 Logo

Support us by buying System76 hardware for you or your company! Or by donating on the Pop!_OS website through the "Support Pop" button. Pop!_OS and COSMIC are fully funded by System76 hardware sales. All systems are assembled in the USA. With your support, we'll work to push the Linux desktop forward with COSMIC.

Links

Guides

Hardware

Recommended

Community Rules

Follow the Code of Conduct

All posts on pop_os must adhere to the Pop!_OS community Code of Conduct. https://github.com/pop-os/code-of-conduct

Be helpful

Posts to pop_os must be helpful. When responding to a user asking for help, do not provide tongue-in-cheek responses like "RTM" or links to LMGTFY. Linking to direct sources that answer the asker's question is fine, but it's advised to provide some explanation as to how you got to that source.

Critique should be constructive

We within the Pop!_OS community welcome helpful criticism or ideas on ways to improve. However, basic "It's bad" or other simple negative comments don't help anyone fix anything. When voicing a complaint about something, try to point out ways the complaint could be improved or worked around, so that we can make a better product for it.

This rule applies to both Pop!_OS and its projects as well as other products available from third-parties.

Don't post malicious "advice"

It can be funny to joke about malicious commands, however this is not the venue for it. Do not advise users to run commands which will lock up their systems, steal their data, or erase their drive. Examples of this include (but are not limited to) fork bombs, rm, etc.

Posts violating this rule will be removed, even if the post is clearly in jest. Repeated offences may lead to a ban. You may understand that the command isn't serious, but a new user might not.

No personal attacks

Posts making a personal attack on any user will not be tolerated.

No hate speech

Hate speech of any kind will not be tolerated. Any violations will be removed, and are grounds for a ban.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Has anyone else had this issue before when updating the BIOS on PopOS or any Linux flavor?

I'm running PopOS 22.04 on a Dell XPS 13 9300 and when I try to update the Dell firmware from 1.17.0 to 1.18.0 I get the following error:

error in fwupd client: calling Install method failed: /boot/efi does not have sufficient space, required 59.2 MB, got 48.6 MB

Running sudo apt autoremove does not fix this. Running sudo fwupdmgr refresh --force and then sudo fwupdmgr update still has the error.

I would really like to not have to backup and resize and pray that nothing breaks when resizing the main partition for more space. Plus there's no good guide on exactly what steps to take for that.

Any help would be appreciated.

More info:

sudo ls /boot/efi
EFI  f52dfaf1ebdd214ad023db586322b2ef  loader

Firmware Upgrade Screen

top 5 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you have an older installation with a the 512 MB EFI partition, you need to edit /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf and set COMPRESS to xz. Then the next time you update the initramfs (sudo update-initramfs -c -k all), it should recover around 150 MB of space. We will probably change this to xz soon.

[–] pnutzh4x0r 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I just did this and was able to recover closer to 100MB (now have 128MB available)... still a great improvement. Boot times don't appear to be impacted, though compression is slower (almost 3-4x slower).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes, I've run into this issue recently. The /boot/efi folder is actually its own partition, so removing packages from / will not give your more space for the efi partition. On my recentish Pop install, the /boot/efi partition is about 512MB which is just about enough space for two kernels but... not much else (they may have increased this to 1GB for new installs).

The workaround I did was to simply delete one of the kernels in /boot/efi/EFI/Pop_OS-... (the ... is some string of letters). In this folder you should have the following:

$ ls -l /boot/efi/EFI/Pop_OS-f2c685b9-a9c2-48f0-907b-ebe199e94a55
total 289256
-rwx------ 1 root root       167 Jul 12 15:24 cmdline
-rwx------ 1 root root 134046998 Jul 12 15:24 initrd.img
-rwx------ 1 root root 134449391 Jul 12 15:24 initrd.img-previous
-rwx------ 1 root root  13844192 Jul 12 15:24 vmlinuz.efi
-rwx------ 1 root root  13846496 Jul 12 15:24 vmlinuz-previous.efi

As you can see, Pop stores the current kernel (vmlinuz) and ramdisk (initrd) along with the corresponding previous versions in case you need/want to revert back to the previous kernel. To free up some space, you can simply delete either the initrd.img-previous or vmlinuz-previous.efi file if you are not using the previous kernel. That should allow you to then download the firmware and update it.

After the firmware update, if you want to restore the previous (backup) kernel, you can copy it from /boot back to the efi folder above. Otherwise, the next kernel update will replace it for you anyways.

I hope this helps, good luck.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you so much for this. It made a lot of sense and I followed exactly and it all worked! Which makes sense. I ended up removing the initrd.img-previous and went through with the update. Eventually maybe I'll need to resize the partition but for now this is my solution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can also burn gparted to a USB and resize the partition. I had to do this a year or two ago on my arch install when I installed zen kernel.