partitioning - 17.04 to 17.10 upgrade tool requires more space on /boot than available from previous default install

I edited the title in the hope that the upgrade tool maintainers would notice and fix it to require less space on /boot

Old title: Can't upgrade 17.04 to 17.10; not enough space on /boot after cleaning; full-disk encryption

This problem is already reported as marco and waldermark but I can't comment those questions because of insufficient reputation and the proposed solutions haven't worked for me.

I'm trying to upgrade from 17.04 to 17.10 because 17.04 reaches end of life in January 2018.

The upgrade aborts with the message:

Not enough free disk space

The upgrade has aborted. The upgrade
needs a total of 167 M free space on disk '/boot'. Please free at
least an additional 1,470 k of disk space on '/boot'. You can remove
old kernels using 'sudo apt autoremove' and you could also set
COMPRESS=xz in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf to reduce the size

of your initramfs.

I had already followed these suggestions and this is the amount of free space available after cleaning /boot. I only have the current kernel installed - so it is cut down to the bone.

$ df -h /boot
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1       236M   66M  159M  30% /boot

$ ls -lah /boot

total 57M
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root 3.0K Oct 28 13:43 .
drwxr-xr-x 27 root root 4.0K Oct 28 13:43 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1.4M Oct  7 06:45 abi-4.10.0-37-generic
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 201K Oct  7 06:45 config-4.10.0-37-generic
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root 1.0K Oct 28 13:43 grub
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  44M Oct 27 19:46 initrd.img-4.10.0-37-generic
drwx------  2 root root  12K Oct 17  2014 lost+found
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 179K Jan 28  2016 memtest86+.bin
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 181K Jan 28  2016 memtest86+.elf

-rw-r--r--  1 root root 181K Jan 28  2016 memtest86+_multiboot.bin
-rw-------  1 root root 3.6M Oct  7 06:45 System.map-4.10.0-37-generic
-rw-------  1 root root 7.3M Oct  7 06:45 vmlinuz-4.10.0-37-generic

• @Marco says that "subsequent sudo apt-get upgrade caused it to complete the system install" - That didn't work for me


• @waldermark says "Did no other changes, but I can now upgrade to 17.10" - That hasn't happened for me

The /boot partition size was set by the Ubuntu installer back in 2014 when I installed Ubuntu on this laptop. It has a single 500GiB SSD. The boot partition is before the data partition. There is no spare space on the SSD. The data partition has a crypt-luks file system. This is all as set up by the Ubuntu installer.

I'm a bit of a novice and also rely on the laptop for my work, so hesitant to do anything that risks trashing the machine and/or taking a long time to do or recover from.

• I am hesitant to nuke the laptop and fresh-install becuase of the time required to backup and restore all the user files and re-install all the currently installed software.




• I am hesitant to try to enlarge the existing boot partition because of comments elsewhere about the hazards of moving the beginning of the (encrypted) data partition.




• I am hesitant to create a new, larger boot partition at the end of
  the disk because I would have to shrink the existing encrypted data
  partition.

I would be more comfortable doing some of those options if I had step by step instructions.

At a more root-cause level, it seems a bit odd that the upgrade tool needs so much extra space on /boot when it has enough space for a few more kernels. Also, this is the size of boot partition created by the Ubuntu installer, so it is foreseeable that systems which have been repeatedly upgraded will have this much free space.

I waited a couple of days and noticed that the upgrade tool had been updated. I tried to upgrade again and the upgrade proceeded without complaint.

The upgraded system still had a problem, but that's a separate issue.