upgrade to kernel 2.6.32-45 fails with "disk full error"

[Pablo Piaggio]

Unable to upgrade the package 'linux-headers-2.6.32-45' either using Update Manager or apt-get.

Error: There are almost 3GB of free space, but apt-get says no disk space. See below for details.

I attempted the usual tricks like apt-get clean, autoclean, autoremove, but it made no change.

Kind Regards.

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  linux-headers-2.6.32-45
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 10.2MB of archives.
After this operation, 0B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Get:1 http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu/ lucid-updates/main linux-headers-2.6.32-45 2.6.32-45.100 [10.2MB]
Fetched 10.2MB in 0s (11.7MB/s)
(Reading database ... 598967 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace linux-headers-2.6.32-45 2.6.32-45.99 (using .../linux-headers-2.6.32-45_2.6.32-45.100_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement linux-headers-2.6.32-45 ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-headers-2.6.32-45_2.6.32-45.100_all.deb (--unpack):
 unable to create `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-45/arch/s390/include/asm/nmi.h.dpkg-new' (while processing `./usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-45/arch/s390/include/asm/nmi.h'): No space left on device
No apport report written because the error message indicates a disk full error
                                                                              dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-headers-2.6.32-45_2.6.32-45.100_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

$ df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 9.4G 6.2G 2.8G 70% /
none 2.0G 388K 2.0G 1% /dev
none 2.0G 212K 2.0G 1% /dev/shm
none 2.0G 360K 2.0G 1% /var/run
none 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /var/lock
none 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda6 94G 45G 45G 51% /home

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: apt 0.7.25.3ubuntu9.14
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-45.99-generic-pae 2.6.32.60+drm33.26
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-45-generic-pae i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Nov 30 15:33:28 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: apt

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Can you post the output of df -i?

[Pablo Piaggio (papibe)]

Hi Phillip Susi (psusi) . Thanks for taking interest.

Your question pointed me in the right direction. I was almost out of nodes:

$ df -i /
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 625856 618015 7841 99% /

and the culprit were the linux-headers:

$ find /usr/src -type f | wc -l
355,112

That was more than *three hundred and fifty thousand* files!

After cleaning the house:

$ df -i
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 625856 192891 432965 31% /

$ ls /usr/src/
linux-headers-2.6.32-44 linux-headers-2.6.32-45-generic-pae
linux-headers-2.6.32-44-generic-pae nvidia-current-195.36.24
linux-headers-2.6.32-45 virtualbox-ose-3.1.6

$ find /usr/src/ -type f | wc -l
28,276

Then, I was successfully able to upgrade my system, and this is not longer a problem.

Thanks again Phillip!

P.S.: In the next days I'll be filling this bug as a generic event that eventually will happen to any installation after a few years (in this case 10.04). The amount of files in the linux-headers is insanely huge, and there's no automatic maintenance.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

You seem to have a relatively small filesystem with few inodes, so yea, I can see this happening if you keep several versions of the kernel headers installed. Glad you were able to sort it out.