Hi folks. I was making some tests with UEFI and BIOS based systems about how the Debian installer behaves. Some questions/ideas: 1) BIOS Boot Partition... it seems you always create it with about 1MiB? How did you choose that? a) It seems like a lot, but is it sure that it will be enough in the future? b) Wouldn't it make some sense to use 4 MiB... so that could help a bit for better alignment on 4K sector devices? 2) ESP... that always seems to have ~510 MIB? (or is it 512 MiB and my tools just showed something wrong?) Again, how did you choose that? I guess it's enough... at least e.g. MS and Apple suggest smaller sizes, see: - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd799232%28WS.10%29.aspx#SystemPartitions - https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2166/_index.html But... UEFI defines (AFAIK) the ESP to always be FAT32 (i.e. the specs don't allow FAT12 or FAT16)... and there are rumours floating around that this least to the minimum ESP size being exactly 512MiB, the alleged minimum FAT32 partition/filesystem size: Arch claims this, e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UEFI#EFI_System_Partition Wikipedia gives this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Size_limits and from MS itself I found only values _for Windows XP_: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463 In any case the minimum size seems to be dependant on the settings of the FAT (cluster size e.g.). So questions... in order to gain maximum compatibility we should format the ESP always with FAT32... but depending on how we do that... is the current size that is made, enough to fulfil the specs? I mean normally, nothing should happen when we'd e.g. use a FAT32 fs that is smaller than it's "official minimum size", cause apparently Linux could already work with it... however one never knows which weird UEFI implementor comes along and adds some crazy "check"... Cheers, Chris. btw: please keep me CCed as I'm off list.
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