How much space do I need on "/" for a 7.4 to 8 stable upgrade?

[Joe Moore]

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Nelson [mailto:dnelson at allantgroup.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 12:33 PM
To: Joe Moore
Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: How much space do I need on "/" for a 7.4 to 8 stable upgrade?

In the last episode (Feb 22), Joe Moore said:
> I need to upgrade a server from 7.4 stable to 8.x stable.
> 
> I running buildworld as I write this, and plan to build a GENERIC kernel.
> 
> The root disk partition is 248 MB which was probably the auto default 
> size when the server was originally built.  I remember having to do 
> some scrambling during the last update to free up enough space for a 
> new kernel and I really don't want that to happen again.
>
> I have 65MB of free space on "/". Is that going to be enough? I've 
> already moved tftpboot to /usr, cleaned out /root, /boot/kernel.old, and /tmp.

I did a 5.5 -> 8.1 upgrade (no intermediate installs!) on a system with a 256MB root a few years ago and didn't have any problems.  As Adam said, get rid of any /boot/*/*.symbol files.  With symbols, a kernel directory could be 50-70 MB, but without, you're looking at only 5-15 MB.  My root is only 90MB used, so there should be quite a bit of space you should be able to free up still.  Try deleting web browser cache dirs or ccache trees in ~root.
 
> What else could I clean out if I need more space? I'm thinking some 
> executables in /rescue.  "ls -l" shows most of them being 4MB each but 
> that can't be right.

All the files in /rescue is hardlinked to each other, so they only consume 4MB total.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com



I deleted /boot/kernel/*symbols and that freed up another 90+ MB.

I've got 159MB free so I'm good to go.

Thanks to all responders!

		...jgm