On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 2:00 PM Chris Murphy <lists(a)colorremedies.com> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 24, 2023, at 12:15 PM, Ben Cotton wrote:
>
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BiggerESP
> This change will increase the minimum size of the ESP to be 500MB,
> which is also the same value used by Microsoft for Windows 10 and
> newer.
Issue 1: Currently anaconda calls mkdosfs on the ESP without any options and
historically are reluctant to add non-default mkfs options. By default, mkdosfs will
create a FAT 16 file system on a 500M (either SI or IEC units). The UEFI spec clearly
prefers FAT 32 for the ESP on built-in drives. To my knowledge there haven't been any
FAT 16 related bugs reported during the many years Fedora created FAT 16 ESPs. But
it's probably better to create it as FAT 32.
I don't know where the cutoff is in the mkdosfs code, but a 512MiB (IEC units) does
result in a FAT 32 file system. So you might make it 512MiB.
Issue 2: Last I checked (about 12 months ago), Windows 10 and 11 images from
microsoft.com were still creating ~99M (I forget which units, and it may have been 100).
That's consistent with:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/co...
"The minimum size of this partition is 100 MB, and must be formatted using the FAT32
file format."
So I'm not sure if Microsoft got the memo, and it's actually vendors' OEM
images that are using large ESP size?
Microsoft has no reason to make it bigger. They have a system boot
architecture that avoids having OS code on the ESP. Some OEMs preload
extra recovery stuff and or extra environments, which might be where
the bigger sizes come from.
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!