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What is the recommended size for a Linux /boot partition?

And is it safe to not have a /boot partition?

I see some servers don't have a /boot partition while some servers have a 128 MB /boot partition. I am a little confused. Is /boot partition necessary? If it is, how large should it be?

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13 Answers 13

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These days, 100 Megabytes or 200 Megabytes is the norm.

You do not need to have a /boot partition. However, it's good to have for flexibility reasons (LVM, encryption, BIOS limitations).

Edit:

The recommended size has been increased to 300MB-500MB.

Also see: https://superuser.com/questions/66015/installing-ubuntu-do-i-really-need-a-boot-parition

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    200 MB is the minimum on most modern Linux but I'd increase it to at least 300 MB to avoid the hassle of re-sizing it.
    – Wernight
    May 1, 2015 at 11:48
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    Just today after getting /boot full, I would definitely recommend more than 200MB. Of course you can manually remove old kernels but from a sysadmin point of view that is a bad thing.
    – lahjaton_j
    May 23, 2017 at 4:07
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    @lahjaton_j I don't see why. Keeping all old kernels is a quirk of debian. There's normally no need to keep more than the most recent besides the current one.
    – Bachsau
    Apr 30, 2019 at 19:22
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    Tested 9 Aug. 2020: the Ubuntu 20.04 installer gave my boot partition exactly 732.00 MiB, so, if I was doing this manually today, I'd just give it 1 GiB and call it good. See my answer here: serverfault.com/a/1029458/357116.
    – Gabriel Staples
    Aug 10, 2020 at 1:15
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    I'd like also to vouch for 1GiB. I'm running into a huge amount of pain at 512MiB because of a weird triple-boot situation. I'm going to resize to 2GiB, just to be safe.
    – lynn
    Nov 8, 2022 at 12:48
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I tend to create a 1 GB /boot. I leave a live CD image which has various repair tools in my /boot. I mostly do this for systems that at the remote sites I support.

With the right configuration, and enough memory, GRUB 2 can boot the image without extracting the contents. A couple of times I have talked remote staff into rebooting the system to the live CD image and starting networking/ssh on a system that was having issues so I could connect and repair things.

This certainly isn't required, or even common.

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    Which Live CD do you prefer in these cases?
    – ewwhite
    Nov 25, 2011 at 12:09
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    For me the distro of choice is SystemRescueCD and Finnix is another nice one.
    – Martian
    Nov 25, 2011 at 13:10
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    You sir, are awesome.
    – SpacemanSpiff
    Nov 25, 2011 at 13:23
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    @zoredache I'm installing arch linux on my external hard disk for work purpose, I would like to add live image as you said you did, for rescue, can you please point me any links how to do that?
    – pahnin
    Jul 5, 2013 at 6:39
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    @pahnin Here are the instructions I found for doing that: help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot (this is probably worth being a question of its own)
    – Thaeli
    Feb 19, 2014 at 15:22
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What is the recommended size for a Linux /boot partition?

The /boot partition contains the GRUB configuration, the kernel with their System.map, ... I think ~ 100 MB is enough.

And is it safe to not have a /boot partition?

Yes. But a separate /boot partition has some advantages:

  • As a rescue partition
  • rootfs is on a LVM, RAID, is encrypted, or unsupported by GRUB
  • Maybe saves a few seconds of the boot time
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    I've been surprised relatively recently with a bios that couldn't access above 1023(?) cylinders, too.
    – Random832
    Nov 25, 2011 at 7:54
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    @quanta how 'may be saves a few seconds of boot time'?
    – Alessandro Pezzato
    Nov 25, 2011 at 13:28
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    Because usually /boot is at the beginning of the disk, which is usually on the outer sectors has less chances to get fragmented and the path is smaller (less directory reads), it is usually a primary partition (no need to read the logical partition chain). But I doubt that you gain more than 1s.
    – Mircea Vutcovici
    Nov 25, 2011 at 15:49
  • "a separate /boot partition has some advantages"...Note that a separate, non-encrypted /boot partition is also required when doing a LUKS-encrypted installation where all root (/) contents are on the LUKS-encrypted partition.
    – Gabriel Staples
    Aug 8, 2020 at 9:17
  • this and other answers like it have not aged well
    – Nobilis
    Jul 12, 2023 at 10:29
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+100

As we have seen quite an increase in linux kernel storage requirements and ever increasing initrds, I nowadays (February 2018) tend to allocate 1 GB of storage for /boot.

As /boot is usually the only thing that is not on LVM, it is the only partition you cannot resize easily. Thus "wasting" a few hundred megabytes usually doesn't hurt as bad as a /boot filesystem that turns out to be too small in maybe 5 or 10 years.

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It also differs distribution from distribution. For example for Fedora minimum is 250 MB[1] and 500 MB is default and if you plan to (pre)upgrade in the future 500 MB is required[2]. If space is not a problem I would go for 1 GB to prevent shuffling partitions later as I had to do when upgrading recently.

[1] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Installation_Guide/s2-diskpartrecommend-x86.html
[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_PreUpgrade#Not_enough_space_in_.2Fboot

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Modern systems are generally installed with a much larger /boot partition than in the past. The number has just been growing over time.

Consider:

RHEL 5 created a 101 MiB /boot partition.

RHEL 5 Partitioning

RHEL 6 created a 500 MiB /boot partition.

RHEL 6 Paritioning

RHEL 7 also created a 500 MiB /boot partition, but this was changed to 1024 MiB in 7.3, because as the release notes state:

In previous releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the default size of the /boot partition was set to 500 MB. This could lead to problems on systems with multiple kernels and additional packages such as kernel-debuginfo installed. The /boot partition could become full or almost full in such scenario, which then prevented the system from upgrading and required manual cleanup to free additional space.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, the default size of the /boot partition is increased to 1 GB, and these problems no longer occur on newly installed systems. Note that installations made with previous versions will not have their /boot partitions resized, and may still require manual cleanup in order to upgrade. (BZ#1369837)

RHEL 7 Partitioning

It remains at 1024 MB in RHEL 8.

RHEL 8 Partitioning

My current EL7 and EL8 systems have roughly 250 MiB used in /boot, but I usually don't install kernel-debug packages.

As the Linux kernel continues to grow over time, mostly due to adding hardware device drivers, this recommendation is likely to continue to grow as well.

And again, as noted by others, a /boot partition isn't strictly required anymore for most installations. VMs generally do not need it, for instance, and UEFI booting systems also don't need it (though they have an EFI System partition which must exist and be large enough to hold various UEFI files). A /boot partition is required for some very old legacy systems and for using LUKS full-disk encryption.

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I just installed Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) with a 105 MB /boot. It installed fine, but after it rebooted I did the updater, and it said that there was not enough space.

It wanted around another 196 MB for the upgrade; it must have been a kernel upgrade or something. So had to reinstall with a bigger /boot. I went for 500 MB, and that seemed to work. It is a good thing it doesn't take long to do a new install :)

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  • Ubuntu doesn't always remove old kernels after an upgrade. You need to do that yourself. Otherwise it may keep several of them around for a long time.
    – hookenz
    Mar 24, 2014 at 2:38
  • I used the default size on my laptop, which is less than 100Mb. The consequence is that whenever I update, I need to remove the before-previous update, so I always have two versions on my computer. On my new laptop, I'll make /boot 1Gb. On my desktop it's 500Mb, wich seems ok.
    – Christine
    Dec 16, 2016 at 21:13
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Moderators ought to close this discussion and put a banner indicating that the 100-200MB /boot partition is an obsolete idea and could cause a world of misery to a novice user and even to one who's been using Linux for a decade, like myself, today. It should be 1 GB as of 2021.

Alex

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    Indeed, I have a server with 250MB and forever having issues with it running out of space. Over the years the shipping initrd images have bloated to now be over 50MB (in 2022), so that 250MB partition, once you also factor in a MEMTest image and a vmlinuz, you have enough space for 3 kernels. When your distribution wants to change them every month, that's not much breathing space at all. Recommendation would be 500MB, or 1GB
    – Mike Macpherson
    Apr 4, 2022 at 13:08
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    Ubuntu (most likely entry point to the world of Linux) keeps 4 kernels, so 1GB is a safe bet. 500MB will not fit 4 kernel v5..6s anymore
    – allanlaal
    Oct 9, 2022 at 20:45
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It's mostly a function of how many kernels you have installed, and the size of their initrds.

For a 3.0 series kernel, initrd runs about 13 MB. For early 2.6 kernels, this was 3.4 MB. So, if you plan on keeping more than a few kernels around, you'll need at least a couple hundred MB.

How much and whether or not this applies to you depends on your use case. If you multi-boot, test kernels, and/or upgrade frequently, you could run out of space on a 100 MB /boot partition quickly. If you don't do any of these things, it's probably going to be sufficient.

There are very few reasons to skimp on storage (it's cheap, BIOS, mount, and bootloader restrictions on blocks are mostly a thing of the past), and I'm seeing a marked growth in kernel resources with time, so the safe bet would be ~250 MB - 1 GB for now. I still generally prefer a separate /boot partition for control and isolation, though this has almost entirely become a matter of taste (RAID devices would be one obvious exception, LVM and encryption as well as noted by others).

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What is the recommended size for a Linux /boot partition?

Answer: 732.00 MiB. I just did an Ubuntu 20.04 install on a completely empty disk and I let it do all the partitioning stuff. I chose the options for "LVM" and "encrypted partition" or whatever, then looked at gparted to see what partition scheme it produced. Here's what I saw on my 512GiB Solid State Drive (SSD):

Partition   Name                    File System          Mount Point        Size        Used        Unused      Flags
---------   ----                    -----------          -----------        ----------  ----------  ----------  -----
/dev/sda1   EFI System Partition    fat32                /target/boot/efi   512.00 MiB    1.02 MiB  510.98 MiB  boot,esp
/dev/sda2   (none)                  ext4                 /target/boot       732.00 MiB   47.66 MiB  684.34 MiB  (none)
/dev/sda3   (none)                  [Encrypted] lvm2 pv  vgubuntu           475.72 GiB  475.72 GiB    0.00 B    (none)

So, it gave the /target/boot partition 732.00 MiB. If I was doing this manually, I'd just give my EFI partition 512 MiB and my boot partition 1 GiB and call it good.

Update 4 June 2023: in Ubuntu 22.04, the /boot partition is now 1.67 GiB! [so I recommend 2 GiB]

This is from a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 automatic partition and install where I chose to have LUKS encryption (not that that affects the /boot partition). Ubuntu's installer now uses a default /boot partition size of 1.67 GiB.

Screenshot from gparted:

My EFI partition is 512 MiB, my /boot partition is 1.67 GiB, and my LUKS-encrypted LVM outer volume container is 1.82 TiB:

enter image description here

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There is a special case when you use a BIOS boot partition on a GPT formatted drive. This partition should be 1 MiB large. From RedHat manual:

You need to create a BIOS Boot (biosboot) partition to install on a BIOS system where the disk containing the boot loader uses GPT. The biosboot partition should be 1 MiB in size. However, you do not need the biosboot partition if the disk containing the boot loader uses MBR.

There was a similar bug too (that was closed, but seems so because of moving that to another place).

I encountered this error when trying to install Fedora Core 29. When I tried to format a 500 Mb bios boot partition, it gave an error biosboot partition: device is too large. I tried to install Arch Linux earlier with that boot partition. It reported no error, but after the installation GRUB continuously reloaded the system (so the boot went no further than GRUB screen).

Otherwise 500 Mb partition is fine. Note also that a EFI partition should be FAT32 formatted, be careful to read the instructions not to reinstall everything again. For a biosboot partition you can choose ext4 if you want.

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It depends also on how many kernels you want to have available. A normal kernel, a "xen" kernel, a "desktop" kernel and in more than one version really sums up well. I wouldn't go for smaller than 500MB. Resizing a front-positioned partition afterwards takes a lot of time.

If you are creating a virtual machine, a separate (virtual) disk may come in handy for several partitions (/home, /boot, /) if you are not familiar with LVM.

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I always use 100MB as a rule when I'm building systems. I suppose if you're going to be testing out tons of different kernels (or building your own custom kernels) you may want a larger one, but 100MB is enough for most people. Also, as mentioned, having a separate boot partition is a good idea for a bunch of reasons.

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    Current distributions want 200MB+.
    – ewwhite
    Jun 29, 2012 at 2:20
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    Update for 2017: May as well make your /boot more like 500MB. 200MB will work, but storage is cheap and having some breathing space will be nice. Use your judgement.
    – James T Snell
    Oct 2, 2017 at 20:27
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    @JamesTSnell btw had an Ubuntu 16.04 installation run out of disk space on 200MB /boot after ~3 years of updates and new kernels - apparently Ubuntu 16.04 update system is not good at cleaning up old kernels. right now /boot is sitting at 240MB there.. and it was quite the hassle fixing it, having to move everything in boot elsewhere, then delete the boot partition, then resize the root partition, then re-create the boot partition then having to move everything back then making sure the new boot partition had the boot flag blah blah blah
    – hanshenrik
    Sep 6, 2019 at 16:03
  • @hanshenrik - I've fixed that problem may times. You don't HAVE to resize your /boot, but doing so will let you change how long will pass before it comes up again. It's definitely quite annoying and I'm not sure if there's a proper solution to having it manage itself.
    – James T Snell
    Sep 6, 2019 at 20:04

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