Fedora 39 Wants To Ensure Your ESP Is Big Enough

The latest feature planning around Fedora 39 for releasing later this year is around ensuring your EFI System Partition (ESP) is large enough for new functionality moving forward.

Currently the Fedora installer will setup the EFI System Partition between 200MB and 600MB by default, but it really should at a minimum be toward that upper-end of the threshold... Windows 10/11 defaults to 512MB as do some distributions like Arch Linux. The proposed plan for Fedora 39 is to also match that with at least 500MB as the minimum size for the ESP.

There is increased pressure on the size of the ESP in order to handle system firmware updates that via FWUPD/LVFS for deployment are positioned on the ESP when rebooting to facilitate the firmware updating process. Additionally, with features coming like Unified Kernel Images there will be further pressure on the size of the ESP.

The F39 change proposal is just about new Fedora Linux installations. But these same reasons for Fedora wanting a larger ESP apply to other Linux distributions too and so if you've been skimping out on your ESP allocation for a tiny bit of storage savings, you may want to re-evaluate that during your next Linux installation.