There are lots of posts about removing old kernels automatically on Ubuntu yet I have found nothing that works .

'apt-get autoremove --purge' does nothing .

here is what I have

dpkg --list | grep linux-image
ii linux-image-5.4.0-52-generic 5.4.0-52.57 amd64 Signed kernel image generic
ii linux-image-5.4.0-53-generic 5.4.0-53.59 amd64 Signed kernel image generic
ii linux-image-5.4.0-54-generic 5.4.0-54.60 amd64 Signed kernel image generic
ii linux-image-5.4.0-56-generic 5.4.0-56.62 amd64 Signed kernel image generic
ii linux-image-generic 5.4.0.56.59 amd64 Generic Linux kernel image

no kernels are removed after a new kernel install

?

Code: Select all

apt autoremove --purge -y

does nothing

myuser@linux-desktop:~$ ls /boot
config-5.4.0-52-generic grub initrd.img-5.4.0-56-generic System.map-5.4.0-52-generic vmlinuz-5.4.0-52-generic
config-5.4.0-53-generic initrd.img initrd.img.old System.map-5.4.0-53-generic vmlinuz-5.4.0-53-generic
config-5.4.0-54-generic initrd.img-5.4.0-52-generic memtest86+.bin System.map-5.4.0-54-generic vmlinuz-5.4.0-54-generic
config-5.4.0-56-generic initrd.img-5.4.0-53-generic memtest86+.elf System.map-5.4.0-56-generic vmlinuz-5.4.0-56-generic
efi initrd.img-5.4.0-54-generic memtest86+_multiboot.bin vmlinuz vmlinuz.old

myuser@linux-desktop:~$ sudo apt autoremove --purge -y
[sudo] password for myuser:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Starting pkgProblemResolver with broken count: 0
Starting 2 pkgProblemResolver with broken count: 0
Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

myuser@linux-desktop:~$ ls /boot
config-5.4.0-52-generic grub initrd.img-5.4.0-56-generic System.map-5.4.0-52-generic vmlinuz-5.4.0-52-generic
config-5.4.0-53-generic initrd.img initrd.img.old System.map-5.4.0-53-generic vmlinuz-5.4.0-53-generic
config-5.4.0-54-generic initrd.img-5.4.0-52-generic memtest86+.bin System.map-5.4.0-54-generic vmlinuz-5.4.0-54-generic
config-5.4.0-56-generic initrd.img-5.4.0-53-generic memtest86+.elf System.map-5.4.0-56-generic vmlinuz-5.4.0-56-generic
efi initrd.img-5.4.0-54-generic memtest86+_multiboot.bin vmlinuz vmlinuz.old

Strange, yes you are right. The autoremove looks likes broken. I've removed all via synaptic.

linux-image-xxx
linux-modules-xxx
linux-modules-extra-xxx

This issue is present in current ubuntu and hence KDE Neon installations and is due to kernels being marked as manually installed. I found a command on the web that corrects this issue by marking all kernels as auto installed:

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sudo apt-mark auto $(apt-mark showmanual | grep -E "^linux-([[:alpha:]]+-)+[[:digit:].]+-[^-]+(|-.+)$")

@dbergstein: Thanks so much for sharing this.
Nice time saver for this annoying circumstance to manually remove linux-headers, linux-image, linux-modules, linux-modules-extra and linux-tools packages for each obsolete kernel before or after almost each distributed kernel update.

Especially if storage technically one's /boot partition can only hold three 5.x kernels, so an 'apt autoremove' covering the removal of unused kernels becomes kind of a duty.
My system was partitioned via kubuntu 15.04 setup before in-place migrating to the first KDE Neon version more than 3 years ago.
And hell yeah, 512 MB as /boot partition for the 3.19.x kernel was definitely sufficient at that time, but unfortunately not for 5.x anymore.

So thanks again for that one

dbergstein wrote:This issue is present in current ubuntu and hence KDE Neon installations and is due to kernels being marked as manually installed. I found a command on the web that corrects this issue by marking all kernels as auto installed:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-mark auto $(apt-mark showmanual | grep -E "^linux-([[:alpha:]]+-)+[[:digit:].]+-[^-]+(|-.+)$")

This helped me big time today as the / directory on one of my machines with windows 8, 2 versions of Linux Mint KDE, and KDE Neon had me at 98%. Thank you.

dbergstein wrote:This issue is present in current ubuntu and hence KDE Neon installations and is due to kernels being marked as manually installed. I found a command on the web that corrects this issue by marking all kernels as auto installed:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-mark auto $(apt-mark showmanual | grep -E "^linux-([[:alpha:]]+-)+[[:digit:].]+-[^-]+(|-.+)$")

Thanks for both finding then posting the code.

dbergstein wrote:This issue is present in current ubuntu and hence KDE Neon installations and is due to kernels being marked as manually installed. I found a command on the web that corrects this issue by marking all kernels as auto installed:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-mark auto $(apt-mark showmanual | grep -E "^linux-([[:alpha:]]+-)+[[:digit:].]+-[^-]+(|-.+)$")

Big thanks! My install got tremendously big with time because of this stupid issue and I was running out of apps to remove and had to constantly use bleachbit up until to the point it didn't cut it anymore today and I couldn't log into using xsession One little retarded thing to bring the whole system down given time, sigh...

I've signed into launchpad issue https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1907887 to give it a "affects me too" vote, hopefully it will get fixed faster that way...

dbergstein wrote:This issue is present in current ubuntu and hence KDE Neon installations and is due to kernels being marked as manually installed. I found a command on the web that corrects this issue by marking all kernels as auto installed:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-mark auto $(apt-mark showmanual | grep -E "^linux-([[:alpha:]]+-)+[[:digit:].]+-[^-]+(|-.+)$")

Thanks! This script found some old nvidia garbage lurking and even loading as well as cleaned up my kernels.

dbergstein wrote:This issue is present in current ubuntu and hence KDE Neon installations and is due to kernels being marked as manually installed. I found a command on the web that corrects this issue by marking all kernels as auto installed:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-mark auto $(apt-mark showmanual | grep -E "^linux-([[:alpha:]]+-)+[[:digit:].]+-[^-]+(|-.+)$")

This worked like a charm! I was able to remove like 10 unused kernels. Thanks for sharing!

Has this bug been fixed? I just cleaned out old kernels in KDE Neon and in Debian Testing too. Maybe they fixed the bug, but it didn't affect kernels older than the bug fix.