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Disk space maintenance on Void Linux

Cleaning old kernels, pruning xbps package cache, and reclaiming disk space on Void Linux without breaking your system.

Duration4 minute read
Updated
TopicsOperating systems, Linux
In short

My Void Linux root partition had quietly filled to 85 percent after almost two years of use, and I wanted a fix without babysitting the system. Running xbps-remove -O to clean obsolete packages from the cache freed almost half of the used space on its own. Removing orphaned dependencies with xbps-remove -o and purging old kernels with vkpurge freed more, though keeping an old kernel around is a sensible safety net. The root partition dropped to 33 percent, and the episode renewed my faith in Void: simple, well-documented utilities whose answers a single search can find.

Monday morning surprise

As I spent most time doing stuff with my computer rather than configuring my beloved Linux distribution, Void Linux (the same machine that runs the OpenBSD guests from my OpenBSD journey), I have developed the tendency to not really bother about Void at all until something crucial becomes unusable. After almost two years of having switched from Arch to Void, I have actually never encountered any major problem and felt I had made the right decision.

I checked my disk usage out of curiosity if the 250GB solid-state disk would be enough. And there came the surprise:

$ df -H
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        8.4G     0  8.4G   0% /dev
tmpfs           8.4G  1.9M  8.4G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           8.4G  1.4M  8.4G   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p3  138G  117G   21G  85% /
efivarfs        158k   85k   69k  56% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
cgroup          8.4G     0  8.4G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/nvme0n1p4  366G   34G  332G  10% /home
/dev/nvme0n1p1  536M  152k  536M   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs           8.4G   25k  8.4G   1% /tmp

My root partition was full, way too full in my opinion. Did I miss something? Is Void not what I was looking for after all? I don’t enjoy baby sitting my OS du jour.

The painless solution

After a quick Brave search, I ended up finding what I was looking for. Some kind fellow software engineer from China didn’t shy away to make a blog post about his journey when he faced the very same problem. Out of annoyance of having to deal with that, I copy-pasted as quickly as possible, not minding what kind of side-effects I might run into, these three commands.

1. Cleaning the package cache

All the knowledge I was lacking was to be found with the man page of xbps-remove.

# xbps-remove -yO

The man page of xbps-remove tells us the -O parameter takes care of cleaning the cache directory removing obsolete binary packages. Obsolete binary packages? Good riddance! I was surprised this to learn that solely this step freed up almost half of my used root partition disk space.

2. Removing orphaned packages

# xbps-remove -yo

Here the same man page tells us that the -o parameter takes care of removing installed package orphans that were installed automatically (as dependencies) and are not currently dependencies of any installed package. As before, good riddance!

3. Purging old, unused kernels

This one is interesting. While I knew about the circumstance that the people behind Void had developed their own package management ecosystem, I hadn’t fully realized there were other utilities that came along with the upstream Void installation which were there for me to manage my beloved OS. So, apparently, one of these is a shell script name vkpurge, I must assume as a short name for Void's Kernel purging tool. I like this type of naming heavily implying its functionality.

# vkpurge rm all

It performed as expected. Old kernel files (and modules?) were indeed purged and freed up even more disk space. I should add that this step is optional as it is always useful to have some old kernels at hand when things hit the fan (which for me, they haven’t in a very, very long time).

Result

I couldn’t be happier.

$ df -H
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
...
/dev/nvme0n1p3  138G   45G   93G  33% /
...

Renewal of faith

Overall, why am I even writing this if some other fellow engineer already figured this out? Simply, because I would therefore be able to explain why I have enjoyed my journey with Void as my go-to Linux distribution. It keeps things simple. Some well-documented utilities. As simple that a simple Brave search suffices to find the answer to my problems.

This very aspect of Void is worthwhile highlighing. I remember more arcane Linux distributions that had me in their grip in figuring things out. Many Googles searches were necessary and even more trial and errors attempts to get simple things fixed.

Now back to my Monday morning.

References and further reading

1

Painting in header image is “Seaside” by Aleksandr Deyneka

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