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One question arise in my mind during the installation of ubuntu that what are the minimum space requirement for the /boot partition ?

Because only the kernel, GRUB and initrd file are present in this section of linux. So I want to know what is the minimum sapce require to create this prtition?

Can we create this partition equal to the Size of all file like GRUB,Kernel and Initrd ?

Sylvain Pineau
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Umesh Kushwaha
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    Well, obviously the minimum is zero, you don't need one except on old BIOSes which have limited addressing, and maybe on the new Terabyte disks. – ubfan1 Apr 08 '14 at 16:32
  • @ubfan1, isn't it needed also in UEFI systems? – Rmano Apr 08 '14 at 20:59
  • A separate /boot partition is not needed on EFI systems, although they do require an EFI System Partition, which some people do mount at /boot (although Ubuntu puts it at /boot/efi by default). A /boot partition can be useful for things other than on old BIOSes and over-2TiB disks, but most of these uses are fairly obscure, particularly in Ubuntu. (The most common use is probably in RAID or LVM setups.) – Rod Smith Apr 09 '14 at 00:18
  • I ran a system with a 250mb boot partition and always had to go in and clean out old boot image versions, so now I'm opting for 2GB hoping it will last a bit longer ... – Erk Aug 27 '18 at 15:06

2 Answers2

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The /boot partition contains the GRUB configuration, the kernel with their System.map, 1GB should be enough.

Name   | Size
/boot  | 250MB ~ 1GB
swap   | at least size of RAM
/      | minimum 8 GB, at least 15 GB recommended

Source

Sylvain Pineau
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  • thnxxx :) its help me a lot – Umesh Kushwaha Apr 08 '14 at 16:27
  • I'd say that 1GB is more than enough. The last I checked, Fedora (which uses a separate /boot partition by default) created one of ~500MB by default. That said, with today's disks commonly exceeding 1TB in size, 1GB (1/1000 of a 1TB disk's capacity) is not likely to be a strain. – Rod Smith Apr 09 '14 at 00:21
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"Can we create this partition equal to the Size of all file like GRUB,Kernel and Initrd?"

This may work at first but would be insufficient for a working system.

The system will keep several kernels around in case you need to fall back to a previous kernel. The number of kernels vary and sometime are not cleared out properly causing your boot partition to fill up. This can lead to complications that are not too hard to fix, but are annoying nonetheless.

Dan
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  • I agree with @dan08. It depends on system configuration, I'd say that a wise choice is a size bigger than grub + 3*(kernel + initrd). On a typical Ubuntu system each kernel requires to put less than 60 MiB in /boot, so 500 MB or 1 GB are enough for sure. – gerlos Nov 07 '17 at 13:29