Viewing Boot Environments

[Chris Dawalt]

In the Manual section 5.3a Viewing Boot Environments discusses the boot environment and I see that mine is growing with each update. (see attached screenshot) I understand that this is normal, but there is no mention of any house keeping, meaning that as the updates continue, are there any space issues that may develop? Is it a good idea to delete the earlier updates?

 

[Mlovelace]

In the Manual section 5.3a Viewing Boot Environments discusses the boot environment and I see that mine is growing with each update. (see attached screenshot) I understand that this is normal, but there is no mention of any house keeping, meaning that as the updates continue, are there any space issues that may develop? Is it a good idea to delete the earlier updates?

Those are snapshots of your boot volume before an upgrade is applied. They can be useful if you need to roll back for whatever reason. That being said, if your boot volume is getting full then you may delete earlier snapshots.

 

[Jailer]

If you are absolutely sure that you won't need to roll back to a previous boot environment you can delete the old boot environments.

 

[Chris Dawalt]

Ok - that is what I figured, and thanks for the quick replies. And forgive me for asking a question which may have an obvious answer, but how do you know when your boot volume is getting full?

 

[dlavigne]

Run df -h |more and the first line for freenas-boot/ROOT/default will show the size and avail as well as the percentage used. Might be worth a feature request to ask for the Boot menu to show the capacity of the boot device. If you create one at bugs.freenas.org, post the issue number here. e.g. a line underneath the "Boot Volume Condition: HEALTHY" that says something like "Current boot capacity: 40%".

 

[cyberjock]

df isn't a good choice for ZFS. It appears to be pretty accurate on my server (df -h shows 2.5GB free on my install and zfs list shows 2.52GB free) but it would be better to use zfs list as that is designed to show free space on zpools. df (and du) can get very confused with ZFS because of snapshots, clones, etc etc etc. Luckily for us the current method with how the pools are used shouldn't break df/du. But it would be a best practice to use zfs list. ;)

 

[Chris Dawalt]

Ok - that worked (ZFS list). Looks like the snapshots don't take up much space.