Fedora 39 Wants To Ensure Your ESP Is Big Enough

[ahyeadude]

For those with ZFS root on Linux, ZFSBootMenu will change your life. It's basically boot environments from FreeBSD, but for your Linux distro dujour.

https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu

It's an EFI stub that allows you to keep your /boot on ZFS without having to do the hacky things (creating a boot pool that has disabled features) you have to do to make grub work. Also you can boot from snapshots, clones, alternative kernels, etc, or make your own directly in the EFI stub.

For me, it eliminated all boot-related issues with running ZFS on root in Linux.

[fitzie]

My system is still bios based, next one will be EFI. From what I gather from this thread it's recommended to make the ESP a btrfs of 640k. In all seriousness, I don't really care for stashing linux kernels on the ESP, but 500MB makes sense if that's what you'd do. My /boot partition used to be a 128MB, but I made it 500MB a while back just not to have worry about space, and that seems to be more then I'll ever need.

[Sonadow]

My system is still bios based, next one will be EFI. From what I gather from this thread it's recommended to make the ESP a btrfs of 640k. In all seriousness, I don't really care for stashing linux kernels on the ESP, but 500MB makes sense if that's what you'd do. My /boot partition used to be a 128MB, but I made it 500MB a while back just not to have worry about space, and that seems to be more then I'll ever need.

I just leave it at 2GB. It will never ever run out.

[Sonadow]

One simple rule, buy hardware with good OS support what ever OS you are using. Many people don't follow this rule and then they get mad.

Then by that logic, Windows is the perfect OS because just about every single hardware accessory released for the desktop with have a Windows driver either provided by the user or by the vendor themselves.

[marlock]

Then by that logic, Windows is the perfect OS because just about every single hardware accessory released for the desktop with have a Windows driver either provided by the user or by the vendor themselves.

perfect? not really...

by that logic the support has to be "good", not just "it exists", which is often not the case

eg: windows is now a PITA for printers compared to Linux

[cooperate]

How about we stop requiring a stupid FAT32 partition to exist in the first place and get a smart solution that can work with any modern Linux filesystem?

Incidentally, on my 100% modern Arch install I just need a little auto-generated stub file from GRUB and the rest of the partition is empty.

vFAT, and thus FAT32, is the only filesystem that's guaranteed to work on all UEFI systems

[fitzie]

vFAT, and thus FAT32, is the only filesystem that's guaranteed to work on all UEFI systems

vfat predates fat32, so it isn't correct to infer fat32 from vfat support. However the UEFI spec mandates fat32 (and others). From https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.10/13_...-system-format

The EFI firmware must support the FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12 variants of the EFI file system.

The next paragraph in the uefi spec details FAT filenames can be long or short, so that seems to mandate vFAT (LFN) as well.

[Melcar]

I have always used 500MB. Never use more than 10MB. 1GB seems excessive. What would take up so much space?

[Jabberwocky]

Then by that logic, Windows is the perfect OS because just about every single hardware accessory released for the desktop with have a Windows driver either provided by the user or by the vendor themselves.

Why limit the support argument to peripherals only?

Intel quick sync for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs has been dropped a year or two ago with a Windows 10 update. You have to install a insecure version of Windows and some how hack it to prevent it from automatically updating to the latest version. There's no easy way of doing this. If you don't care about security then i7-3770k is still a decent CPU. This obviously doesn't work on Windows 11 either.

Thousands of drivers do not automatically work because Windows policy changed to only accept signed drivers. For me this is an issue around audio and networking but for others this could be any device. Again there is a way to force it with a workaround by booting up in safe mode. There's no easy way of doing this.

Windows doesn't support new Apple laptops which are very popular at the moment. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-using-windows-11-with-mac-computers-with-apple-m1-and-m2-chips-cd15fd62-9b34-4b78-b0bc-121baa3c568c

Like marlock said printers have very limited support under Windows.

One simple rule, buy hardware with good OS support what ever OS you are using. Many people don't follow this rule and then they get mad.

I feel like I need to state the obvious: This is not only true for Windows, Linux but even BSD. People get angry because PfSense doesn't run on their hardware or TrueNAS core doesn't work. Heck even ESXI not supporting onboard NICs on $20 000 servers. Do your research before you buy.

[thebs]

I'm glad to see this. If you have 4KiB sectors, the minimum FAT32-based [u]EFI System Partition (ESP) is 260MiB, so 100-200MiB is not sufficient. Yes, 512 byte 'logical' for 4KiB sectors is an option, but it won't be offered forever, and shouldn't.

Hence, why I've long advocated using a minimum of (first 0.5GiB) ...

• 1MiB offset
• 511MiB ESP (/boot/efi)

Or (first 0.5GiB) ...

• 1MiB offset
• 383MiB ESP (/boot/efi)
• 128MiB MSR (Microsoft Reserve Partition)
  • NOTE: Microsoft now recommends only 16MiB for MSR with Windows 10, unlike the 128MiB for Windows 7/8.x
  • So ... 495MiB + 16MiB instead

And then a minimum of 0.5GiB for /boot to round out the first 1GiB.

But today I'd just go full (first 1GiB) ...

• 1MiB offset
• 895MiB ESP (w/1MiB off-set)
• 128MiB MSR for the first 1GiB
  • So ... 1007MiB + 16MiB

And then a good 1GiB for /boot, to round out the first 2GiB. Add more 1GiB slices to offer multiple /boot partitions for multiple Linux installs if that's your thing.

And yes, I just go ahead and reserve the MSR area, even if there is no Windows that will touch it. It doesn't hurt to put it on external/portable drives either, in case it is plugged into a Windows system.