Re: Whole lot of dir's in /lib/modules - can I delete them?

Michael <[email protected]> Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:10:33 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.gentoo.user
Message-ID	<5070256.GXAFRqVoOG@rogueboard>

On Sunday, 26 April 2026 16:52:30 British Summer Time 
[email protected] wrote:
> Dear all,
> Whilst doing a world update I happened to see that the nvidia driver
> was doing something in the dir "/lib/modules/7.0.1-gentoo-dist" - I am
> currently on 7.0.1. I thought "Just out of interest, I wonder what's
> in there". I went there and saw dirs:
> 
> 6.11.10-gentoo-dist
[snip ...]

> 6.19.9-gentoo-dist
> 7.0.1-gentoo-dist
> 
> All of these dir's take up approx 51GB of space. As I am on kernel
> 7.0.1, do I need all of these dir's? Can I basically do a "rm -r 6*"
> and blow them all away, except the current?
> 
> Any thoughts/enlightenment greatly appreciated,
> 
> 		Andrew

Whenever you build a kernel with various options built as modules [M], 
as opposed to building them in-kernel [*], the compiled modules are 
stored under /lib/modules/.

You can find all available modules of your current kernel with:

find /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -type f -name '*.ko*'

If you have cleared out old kernel images and initramfs files from your 
/efi/ or /boot/, then you have no use for their old module files hanging 
around in your /lib/modules/ and you can safely delete them manually to 
recover disk space.

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