Question on EFI partition for Windows 11 dual boot

[Argumon]

To install Manjaro along with an existing Windows 11, I created swap, root and home partitions in the free space and mounted the existing EFI partition under /boot/efi.
The installer complains, that an EFI partition needs to be 300M, but mine is only 260M. According to an older thread (“How to extend EFI system partition?”) I ignored the warning and continued with the installer.
In the summary of the installer I see, that it wants to format the EFI partition. Is this intentional? I expected it just to add entries to the existing EFI partition, because I want as little impact on the Windows installation as possible. Or is it necessary to format the EFI partition?
Do I misunderstand something?

[megavolt]

@Argumon

In the summary of the installer I see, that it wants to format the EFI partition. Is this intentional?

If you create and choose a second EFI partition, then yes. It needs a vfat file system.

@Argumon

I expected it just to add entries to the existing EFI partition, because I want as little impact on the Windows installation as possible

Then create a second efi partition for Manjaro, so that it has zero impact on windows or vice versa. 100MB is enough if boot files are on root. On that partition are just efi files, entries are written in NVRAM of the UEFI.

Opinion: No idea where the calamares devs get the 300MB default, but even 50MB would be enough, but then it would FAT16 instead of FAT32.

[Wollie]

In analogy to Archlinux wiki:

• For early and/or buggy UEFI implementations the size of at least 512 MiB might be needed.[3]
• To ensure the partition can be formatted to FAT32, it should be at least 36 MiB on drives with 512 byte logical sector size and 260 MiB on drives with 4096 logical sector size.[4]
• If you plan to install multiple kernels and either mount the partition to /boot/efi or pack the kernels in unified kernel images, you can use 1 GiB to be on the safe side.

I’m wondering why Calamares not provides the option to just assign the existing ESP without formatting, this should be expected. Has your ESP the right partition type GUID (C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B)?

[Argumon]

Many thanks to both of you for your fast help

If you create and choose a second EFI partition, then yes. It needs a vfat file system.

I wanted to use the existing EFI partition, but the installer wanted to reformat it so I choose to quit.

I’m wondering why Calamares not provides the option to just assign the existing ESP without formatting, this should be expected. Has your ESP the right partition type GUID (C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B)?

OK, will double check that (I am on Windows on that machine right now)

Blockquote Then create a second efi partition for Manjaro, so that it has zero impact on windows or vice versa.

I wanted to avoid that. This Laptop is an Acer Predator Helios 300. I formely had an older version of it, there I have created a 2nd EFI partition which worked well with Windows and Manjaro. But the BIOS from that model was rubbish. After booting into BIOS, I could not change any settings when the 2nd EFI partition was there. Deleting the 2nd EFI partition brought the BIOS back to life again.
Now I don’t do changes in the BIOS settings every day (or week or month). But it was a bit cumbersome to drop and recreate the EFI partition every time I needed to change something. As I don’t now if this model (2022) has the same bug, that would be my last option.

I will check the GUID first.

[cscs]

I’ve been running a dualboot with 100mb ESP for years … often having 3 or 4 kernels … space has not been a concern. So your 260M should be more than enough, even if you added another couple of OSs.

If I were you I would use (not format) the existing ESP,
but I would want the ESP mount point to be /efi instead of /boot/efi which is no longer recommended.

Note:

• /efi is a replacement[6] for the historical and now discouraged ESP mountpoint /boot/efi.
• The /efi directory is not available by default, you will need to first create it before mounting the ESP to it.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFI_system_partition#Typical_mount_points

[Argumon]

If I were you I would use (not format) the existing ESP,
but I would want the ESP mount point to be /efi instead of /boot/efi which is no longer recommended.

Good to know, thanks. I tried it again and left the EFI partition to ‘Keep’. This time it works as expected. So maybe I did something wrong the first time, sorry for making unnecessary noise here.

Unfortunately, the installer crashed right after that. I will do some more testing and maybe open another thread.

Many thanks for your help everyone!

[Aragorn]

@cscs

but I would want the ESP mount point to be /efi instead of /boot/efi which is no longer recommended.

Only if you’re a follower of Lennart Poettering’s propaganda machine.

Using /efi as the mountpoint is indeed recommended… if you use systemd-boot instead of GRUB, and to the best of my knowledge, Fedora is the only distribution that does it that way.

Strictly speaking, the EFI partition doesn’t even need to be mounted at all, unless you’re reinstalling the boot loader or — as I said — if you use systemd-boot. The Gentoo community doesn’t even mount /boot if it’s a separate partition. /boot and /boot/efi (or /efi) are never accessed during normal system operation, and /boot is only written to during an upgrade.

I have /boot on a separate partition — ext4, because I use btrfs for the rest — and I normally have it mounted read-only. Likewise for /boot/efi.

[cscs]

Then Arch and myself are guilty of that …

Or maybe … we simply agree with the assessment (which seems to now be not so rare):

/boot/efi is just stupid, as it implies that an ESP partition implies a separate /boot partition, but that’s nonsense.

That, along with other arguments, do not hinge solely on systemd-boot.

Whether there is much impetus to likewise follow suit on a non-systemd system is maybe another question … but we do run systemd here. As well as pretty closely resemble this model:

But /boot is a weird place for the kernels if they aren’t needed there… On Fedora, kernels are shiped next to the kmods in /usr/lib/modules/$KERNEL_VERSION and simply copied into the ESP or /boot as necessary. That way the boot partition (regardless if ESP or legacy) is entirely redundant, and the system partition is fully self-sufficient, so that the ESP or /boot can be reconstructed at any time.

Also … heres Archs specific merge thread:

Set /efi partition as default ESP mountpoint (separate /boot and /efi)

PS

@Aragorn

Only if you’re a follower of Lennart Poettering’s propaganda machine.

Even the broken clock on the macos macbook you take to linux conferences can be right at least once a day.

[Wollie]

@cscs

but I would want the ESP mount point to be /efi instead of /boot/efi which is no longer recommended

Manjaro is not Arch. At the moment /boot/efi is still the standard ESP mount point of Manjaro.

UEFI - Install Guide

[cscs]

I know, but despite the installer defaults … everything else applies, including systemd automounting …

[Unstable Update] 2023-05-21 - Repository changes

This is the new standard for ESP’s But it still shouldnt have changed/added to yours. Looks like it did here too: $ mount | grep "/efi " systemd-1 on /efi type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=38,pgrp=1,timeout=120,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct,pipe_ino=17650) /dev/sda1 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro) PS I also got the permissions change … just followed with chmoding the locations to the new permissions…

[Unstable Update] 2023-05-21 - Repository changes

Coming from systemctl status efi.automount https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#GPT_partition_automounting Im sure it could be handled … but Id really just rather take this as an opportunity to ditch the old discouraged /boot/efi and start using /efi as ESP. Edit. Success. $ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS sda 8:0 0 238.5G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 100M 0 part /efi ├─sda2 8:2 0 16M 0 part ├─sda3 8:3 0 97.7G 0 part ├─sda4 8:…

[Aragorn]

@cscs

Whether there is much impetus to likewise follow suit on a non-systemd system is maybe another question … but we do run systemd here.

Gentoo does support systemd. It is one of the available init choices — and with a strong following — even though the default choice in the stage 3 tarballs is still Gentoo’s own openrc.

@cscs

As well as pretty closely resemble this model:

But /boot is a weird place for the kernels if they aren’t needed there… On Fedora, kernels are shiped next to the kmods in /usr/lib/modules/$KERNEL_VERSION and simply copied into the ESP or /boot as necessary. That way the boot partition (regardless if ESP or legacy) is entirely redundant, and the system partition is fully self-sufficient, so that the ESP or /boot can be reconstructed at any time.

Yep, that comes straight from freedesktop.org — i.e. RedHat’s propaganda machine — and from Lennart Poettering’s blog, and it’s part of Lennart’s wet dream of turning GNU/Linux into a stateless machine. And in seeking to attain that goal, Herr Poettering and his minions have already managed to (deliberately) break established and sane UNIX convention on numerous occasions.

But now that Lennart and his substantial ego have relocated to Microsoft, things just might change again.

@cscs

@Aragorn

Only if you’re a follower of Lennart Poettering’s propaganda machine.

Even the broken clock on the macos macbook you take to linux conferences can be right at least once a day.

I don’t own any Apple-branded hardware, and my health prevents me from attending any conferences.

[cscs]

@Aragorn

I don’t own any Apple-branded hardware, and my health prevents me from attending any conferences.

Its a reference to poettering … given your intent to counter-propagandize I thought you might already be aware of that common dig.
It happened more than once
(but apparently not recently enough to be able to find in a quick search … its all eclipsed by the news of ‘poettering quits linux to work for microsoft’)