Description of problem: I recently ran preupgrade to jump from F12 stable to F13 Alpha. It was a successful transition but I think preupgrade could be enhanced in terms of /boot partition space. Currently, preupgrade attempts to put the install image data on the /boot partition and the user is then notified if 100% of the partition is filled after an attempt fails. In my own case, I did not have enough space on /boot initially, so I simply removed some legacy initramfs files and it ran smoothly. However, perhaps it would be better if preupgrade could scan /boot at the very start of the upgrade process and calculate if enough space is available and, if there is not, alert users to remove legacy files? It might make the process a little smoother, especially for newbies as most people who run "yum update" regularly will have a number of legacy files from past kernel updates from F12. How reproducible: Every time. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run preupdate on a machine in which there is not enough space left on /boot. Actual results: Rudimentary alert is produced by disk analysis, stating that 100% of partition is filled after preupdate has run and attempted to install compressed boot image. Expected results: A more detailed error message, preferably before preupdate starts to actually install anything, stating how much capacity /boot has and how much preupdate requires. Additional info:
Very good idea as the /boot space problem is the no. 1 problem with using preupgrade. I hope that fresh installs default to something like 500 MB at least for /boot, since it is effectively impossible to currently use preupgrade without having to do various hacks behind the scenes. Even with a single current kernel with 200 MB there is simply not enough space for the install2 image.
See also bug 573451: preupgrade supports downloading install.img at boot time.
Downloading install.img at boot time is only a partial solution as it requires a wired connection to the internet, which might sometimes be unavailable. On a related issue, preupgrade refuses to download the install.img into /boot if it is configured as a RAID 0 device. There is no reason for treating this as an error it would work perfectly well.
I should have said a RAID1 array in comment 3.
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