apt autoremove doesn´t catch all old kernels

[udippel]

I have an install with nominally 500MB as /boot. I'm regularly running beyond that limit at updates.
Instead of manually picking out old files and apt --purge, I found that more recently apt autoremove would do that task. That brought me down by 11 MB only, from 100%:
445 401 11 98%
apt update apt upgrade apt autoremove and reboot didn't improve the situation.

A tad reluctantly I installed byobu and ran one session of purge-old-kernels. Result:
445 277 135 68%
I can live with that; though I couldn't with the result above.
Of course, I'd prefer apt autoremove to do everything in a single go. But what it does, does not actually warrant the deprecation of purge-old-kernels. I'm surely not the only person with a tight budget when using a separate /boot of an old installation. Or, as in my case, a fresh install into an old, formerly partitioned drive.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

APT automatically removes unnecessary kernels. If something depends on a specific kernel version or you marked that kernel as manually installed it will be kept of course. Also it will always keep 2 kernels around as a minimum, and of course the currently booted kernel.

[udippel (udippel)]

I didn't mark any kernel specifically on this machine. It's just a third one, all-purpose, carry-about laptop.
My filing wasn't against autoremove, though against deprecation. You don't deprecate a utility that works significantly more effectively than the subsequent utility.

The man-page currently says in the context of purge-old-kernels that functional problems should be filed like what I did. Unfortunately I didn't list all files and kernels (rc, ii) on /boot. But there had been a lot, accumulated over some 2 or 3 years since install. autoremove removed just one.

Like it or not, the man page should rather say that apt autoremove does this job, too. But when a still tighter ship needs to be run, purge-old-kernels could well be tried out to remove additional remnants of older kernels.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for apt (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]