Unexpected disk saturation on Slowroll: Orphaned kernels and oversized journal logs

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1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been running openSUSE Slowroll for a while now, and I recently ran into a critical disk space issue on my 40GB Btrfs / partition. It seems that over time, old kernels were not being purged automatically, which gradually led to Btrfs saturation.

I’don’t know if I messed up a configuration setting or else, but zypper purge-kernels didn’t report anything to remove, even though my /usr/lib/modules was massive.

Here is what I found before manual cleanup:

sudo du -hxd1 /usr/lib | sort -hr | head -n 10
13G     /usr/lib
9.7G    /usr/lib/modules

Upon inspection, I had over 50 different kernel versions stored there, while only 2 were actually registered by rpm -q kernel-default.

Additionally, my logs had grown significantly without being rotated/cleaned up:

sudo du -hxd1 /var | sort -hr | head -n 5
6.3G    /var
4.5G    /var/log

I managed to recover the space by manually deleting the orphaned module folders and vacuuming the journal, but I wanted to report this to see if others are experiencing similar issues with kernel retention or if there’s a recommended tweak for the multiversion.kernels policy on Slowroll to prevent this “ghost” accumulation.

Has anyone else noticed their /usr/lib/modules or /var/log exploding lately?

Thanks for your insights!

2

on tumbleweed so maybe for reference

ls /usr/lib/modules
6.19.2-1-default  6.19.3-1-default  6.19.6-1-default

du -hxd1 /usr/lib | sort -hr | head -n 2
2,9G    /usr/lib
736M    /usr/lib/firmware

sudo du -hxd1 /var | sort -hr | head -n 5
6,6G    /var
3,0G    /var/tmp
2,5G    /var/lib
744M    /var/log
201M    /var/adm
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Do you have Nvidia drivers installed? If so, those modules are not purged by purge-kernels so /usr/lib/modules/xxx-default/update/nvidia* modules accumulate over time and must be cleared every now and then.
If that is your case, you should find that the two /usr/lib/modules/ for “installed” kernels are some 400 MB in size, while those for “purged” kernels are less than half that size.

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Thank you very much for the explanation! I am indeed using the proprietary Nvidia drivers, and your diagnostic is spot on.

That makes perfect sense. 50 orphaned folders × ~200MB of Nvidia modules = 10GB.

I’ll make sure to manually check and clean /usr/lib/modules after major updates from now on. Thanks again !

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