Flash space apparently missing after request platform software package clean on 3850's

[OliverR]

Hi all.

Hoping that someone can point out something I'm over looking.

Recently I was asked to deploy an update to 16.03.06 on switches running 16.03.05b. I downloaded & installed 16.03.06 but before rebooting it into production I was asked to use 16.03.07 instead.

To remove 16.03.06 I restored the original 16.03.05b packages.conf and ran a 'request platform software package clean switch all' to delete the unnecessary packages. That appeared to complete and successfully delete the packages.

The odd thing is that flash space seems to be missing, now there isn't even enough space to download the new .bin to (or even repeate the download of 16.03.06, let alone install it)

Calculating the amount free after running the clean command doesn't match (even closely) to the value IOS is now reporting.

Total Size             1624104960
Bytes Free Before Delete              456024064
Size of files deleted         546167177
Bytes Free After               487485440

It look very like older release of IOS where files were soft deleted, requiring a squeeze to actually free up the space.

So far I've seen this 2 separate instances of this, same sympthoms. There are more to do so trying to understand ahead of time what's actually happening.

Anyone any thoughts?

[Leo Laohoo]

Could be a bug.

[pieterh]

how did you restore the packages .conf?

You did not use the command request platform software package install rollback ?

did the system make a snapshot that is not released ?

[OliverR]

Thanks for the comments guys.

No didn't use the rollback, manually renamed the packages.conf.00- packages.conf

The switch wasn't rebooted, haven't been in this scenario before (ie abandoning a firmware update after installing the pkg files). You expect rollback would have worked differently?

[OliverR]

After rebooting the flash space becomes available.

Haven't found another way to retrieve it as of now. I've also seen similar behaviour on 1 x 03.07.04E switch which will hopefully release the flash space  (yet to reboot that one).