Exalogic: How To Clean Boot Space On Exalogic Linux Physical Compute Nodes (Doc ID 2900444.1)

Last updated on OCTOBER 17, 2022

Applies to:

Goal

Compute nodes running Oracle Linux 6 that were originally reimaged to EECS 2.0.6.2.0 or earlier versions of Exalogic are configured with a boot partition of size 96MB. With the transition (upgrade) from UEK2 to UEK4 delivered through Oct 2021 PSU, this boot partition size is insufficient to install more than two UEK4 kernels.

With two UEK4 kernels installed, the free space remaining in the boot partition is about 8MB, resulting in prepatch check failure while applying a PSU. The following error message is observed in the log files:

When this error is encountered, it is necessary to clean up the boot partition by deleting the older unused kernel and any other unnecessary files to free up space to enable the installation of a newer kernel as part of the PSU.

This document provides a procedure to free up space in the boot partition.

This issue is typically not encountered on compute nodes that have been originally reimaged with EECS 2.0.6.3.0 or higher, where the boot partition is 500MB in size, since there is sufficient space to install 3 UEK4 kernels, but may still be encountered if any older UEK2 kernels or additional debug kernels or kdump images are still installed.

Solution

My Oracle Support provides customers with access to over a million knowledge articles and a vibrant support community of peers and Oracle experts.