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Every time I boot up I get the warning

Low disk space on 'efi' The volume 'efi' has only 12.4 MB disk space remaining.

Overview:

  • This is a brand new machine, a Dell XPS 17 that came preinstalled with Windows. I added a second SSD drive onto which I have installed Pop!_OS.
  • As far as I'm aware, each OS is completely isolated on its own drive, each with its own EFI partition.
  • I initially had some difficultly getting the out-of-the-box encryption to work, and had to wipe and install PopOS again. Perhaps this is the source of the issue (?)
  • Other than the above, I have done almost nothing else with this machine: nothing else installed or changed. It's brand new. I can boot into Windows by manually going into the bios and selecting it. I plan on using PopOS as my primary OS.

Everywhere on the internet tells me that 522mb is more than enough for an efi partition, so presumably some of what's on there shouldn't be? I've read a few questions on this pertaining to deleting old kernels and even resizing the efi partition; all using arcane, roundabout methods; and all of which I am hesitant about as I'm still relatively new to Linux and don't know what I'm doing.

In my /boot/efi/EFI directory, I have the following:

  • BOOT (104k)
  • Dell (32k)
  • Linux (4k)
  • Pop_OS_cd6a3602-35b1-4403-a322-03217981e2425 (361M)
  • Recovery-1CC1-9F42 (125M)
  • systemd (104k)

In the largest directory there, the Pop one, I have the following:

  • cmdline (4k)
  • initrd.img (170M)
  • initrd.img-previous (169M)
  • vmlinuz.efi (12M)
  • vmlinuz-previous.efi (11M)

( note: I have also run sudo apt autoremove which does nothing. )

I have only a superficial understanding of what these things are, what they do, and how they have come to be there. I don't understand why people on these similar question threads are talking about 100mb or 256mb efi partitions being "more than enough" when I clearly have accumulated files right there that easily exceed that. Why do people even care so much about trimming this partition down to its minimum possible size when it clearly becomes a computer-can't-boot-anymore crisis when it becomes full, and resizing these system-level partitions is a risky and far-from-straightforward endeavor? Why not just make these partitions 4GB+ and be done with it? Is space this much of an issue in 2022? Both of my SSDs are 2TB each. I could easily have granted this partition ten times the disk space and avoided this stupid problem.

Presumably the '-previous' files I could safely delete... probably? But I've also read on other threads that this carries risk?

I don't want to nuke my machine and I don't want to have to install PopOS again. I want to understand what is going on. I would greatly appreciate some basic guidance on this. Please let me know if you need any more information.

EDIT: see attached image of my disks overview

EDIT2: output of df /boot/efi as follows:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on

/dev/nvme1n1p1 508920 496816 12104 98% /boot/efi

EDIT NUMBER 3: So far, I feel my question remains sorely unanswered. Here is a link to someone decrying why POP_OS doesn't install on a system with an efi partition smaller than 512mb, because according to this person "using a 512Mb partition for efi is like using a 5000 gallon tank for your tetra. The boot entry is extremely small after all, I have run 6 distros plus w10 on a 128Mb efi partition in the past"

And here's me, with a 522mb efi partition-- larger than any recommendation I have seen-- and it's at 97% capacity on a clean install. Why? Why is my system insisting on using this much? Why are those initrd.img files at 170mb? I don't understand it.

disks

Inigo
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  • Here is another question along similar lines asking if the '-old' (I assume equivalent to '-previous', e.g. my `initrd.img-previous` file) can safely be deleted. The consensus seems to be "yes, but they'll just get recreated again when you upgrade the kernel. In my case, my `initrd.img-previous` is *169M*. Is that unusually big? If not, and everything I'm seeing ^^ in my system is normal, then why do people say efi partitions only need to be a maximum of ~500mb? It doesn't make any sense. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1049427/can-i-remove-initrd-img-and-vmlinuz-in-root – Inigo Sep 25 '22 at 17:29
  • The best would be to increase the size of the EFI partition to the more usual 500 MB. – harrymc Sep 25 '22 at 17:49
  • @harrymc as I said, my EFI partition is already **522MB**. Nowhere have I seen it recommended that it should ever need to be larger than this. Which is why I'm trying to understand what has gone wrong with my system. I am also unsure of how to go about increasing the size of the partition (I realise there are already answers about this out there, but they differ, and I don't fully understand the logic behind them, and I'm wary that I could make my system unbootable without understanding what I'm doing). – Inigo Sep 25 '22 at 17:57
  • Could you add a screenshot of disks & sizes? And some operating systems install a lot in the EFI partition. Are you sure you have in it only one OS? I have also seen Linux installations that recommended 550MB. – harrymc Sep 25 '22 at 17:57
  • Your partition may be 522 MB, but is the filesystem? Please provide the output of `df /boot/efi`. // As you can see, the generic (not specialized for your PC) initramfs files on modern Linux can be quite large. That means the advice you found is most likely simply outdated. – Daniel B Sep 25 '22 at 18:03
  • @harrymc - sure; see edit. Exploring the `/boot/efi` directory I don't see anything relating to Windows there, so I'm fairly sure but by no means certain. It would help if I had a better understanding of what I should actually expect to see there... – Inigo Sep 25 '22 at 18:05
  • Everything seems correct. I suggest increasing the size to 550 MB to get rid of the message. EFI requirements keep increasing all the time, and the documentation may only follow much later. – harrymc Sep 25 '22 at 18:09
  • @DanielB please see new edit. Yes, understood I may be looking at outdated info... – Inigo Sep 25 '22 at 18:10
  • If increasing this partition to 550MB (incidentally: why not larger?) is the way to go, then that's what I'll do. May I ask how you would recommend going about that...? thanks. – Inigo Sep 25 '22 at 18:11
  • You would need to reduce some partition - the best would be the one just following the EFI, push that partition down as far as it will go, then increase the EFI. It might be better to do that while booting into a partition editor from USB, rather than from disk. – harrymc Sep 25 '22 at 18:14
  • Thanks, I understand the logic. But my understanding is that it isn't that simple because gparted and other similar tools won't let you adjust the size of system/boot partitions. Many of the existing questions on this seem to say the only way to do this is to create a *new* partition of the desired size and copy the data across. e.g. http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=17904 There is also the complication that my main partition is Luks encrypted, meaning that resizing it is not straightforward either. – Inigo Sep 25 '22 at 18:21
  • @harrymc I have booted from the PopOS usb and am running GParted. "the best would be the one just following the EFI, push that partition down as far as it will go, then increase the EFI." -- This is not possible. It won't let me resize these partitions. The partition following the efi one is the 'recovery' partition. The min and max size for this is enforced at 4096mb. – Inigo Sep 25 '22 at 18:23
  • Then reduce the partition after that, and you'll have two partitions to push down. Reducing the LUKS partition might be better done while booting from disk Linux, but I have never done that myself. – harrymc Sep 25 '22 at 18:35
  • Right-- and that opens another can of worms because resizing an encrypted Luks partition is not as simple as simply tweaking the size of in gparted: https://www.golinuxcloud.com/resize-luks-partition-shrink-extend-decrypt/ I think at this stage reinstalling Pop!_OS would be the better option. This time I'll make the efi partition 2gb. Because why not? Hell, I might make it 4. This is very frustrating because I don't understand why I have run into this problem and why there is so much of what frankly seems like misinformation about this topic out there. – Inigo Sep 25 '22 at 18:44

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