Old Kernels Removal

I see the discussion on removing old Kernels has been locked, so forgive this ‘new topic’.
I appreciate that is not considered good practice, but I would like to remove one of the three Kernels (two of which appear to be identical oddly??) I see when booting Fedora 32.
I would then like to keep just two Kernels, the current/new one and the previous/old one.
Can anyone explain how to do that? Everything I’ve googled and found so far (2 sites) have commands which are not recognised in Fedora 32.
Simply please: I’m a newbie to Fedora and only otherwise familiar with Ubuntu and Manjaro…

6 Likes

Sure, here are the steps:

You can list the currently installed kernels using rpm:

$ rpm -q kernel-core
kernel-core-5.6.8-300.fc32.x86_64
kernel-core-5.6.10-300.fc32.x86_64
kernel-core-5.6.11-300.fc32.x86_64

Then, you can remove one (not the one currently in use which you can find by running uname -a in a terminal) using dnf:

$ sudo dnf remove kernel-core-5.6.8-300.fc32
Dependencies resolved.
==============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================
 Package                                                        Architecture                                     Version                                                     Repository                                                  Size
==============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================
Removing:
 kernel-core                                                    x86_64                                           5.6.8-300.fc32                                              @updates-testing                                            72 M
Removing dependent packages:
 kernel                                                         x86_64                                           5.6.8-300.fc32                                              @updates-testing                                             0
 kernel-modules                                                 x86_64                                           5.6.8-300.fc32                                              @updates-testing                                            28 M
 kernel-modules-extra                                           x86_64                                           5.6.8-300.fc32                                              @updates-testing                                           1.9 M

Transaction Summary
==============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================
Remove  4 Packages

Freed space: 102 M
Is this ok [y/N]:

To only ever have two kernels installed, you need to change the value of installonly_limit in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf. It is 3 by default:

$ cat /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
[main]
gpgcheck=1
installonly_limit=3
clean_requirements_on_remove=True
best=False
skip_if_unavailable=True

You can do this using a terminal editor: nano/peco/vi/vim/emacs or sed:

$ sudo sed -i 's/installonly_limit=3/installonly_limit=2/' /etc/dnf/dnf.conf

$ cat /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
[main]
gpgcheck=1
installonly_limit=2
clean_requirements_on_remove=True
best=False
skip_if_unavailable=True

8 Likes

or

sudo dnf config-manager --setopt=installonly_limit=2 --save

3 Likes

Thank you very much Francisco - that was exceptionally helpful. Worked beautifully to remove the one unwanted kernel I had…
I chose Youssef’s solution to set the future limit - so thank you very much Youssef!

3 Likes

Many thanks Youssef. I have employed your solution to modify the kernels limit to 2.
I look forward to seeing it work!

2 Likes

useful guide from you.

is necessary removing them? will it breaks something on system?

i ran that command and potput is:
rpm -q kernel-core
kernel-core-5.6.6-300.fc32.x86_64
kernel-core-5.6.8-300.fc32.x86_64
kernel-core-5.6.10-300.fc32.x86_64

1 Like

No, there’s no need to remove them. People usually remove them if they are running short of space on the / partition. Fedora keeps 3 kernels installed by default, in case a new kernel has a regression and breaks some hardware users can reboot into an older kernel that works. (I test kernels from the updates-testing repository, so I sometimes even keep 5 kernels around)

5 Likes

thanks for your supporting and time

1 Like

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