Hi Karsten,

On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 09:41:34PM +0100, Karsten Merker wrote:

...

We then provide a default partitionning scheme. I'd like feedback on that one. I appreciate that having a good default in such a case, but I'd like to have a reasonably simple layout that works good enough to install a distro. I'm a bit short on background on what an EFI partition is supposed to look like, and what a good size would be. I'd really like some input on this.

the partitioning scheme from patch no. 3 of this series looks like follows:

#define PARTS_DEFAULT \ "name=loader1,start=8k,size=32k;" \ "name=loader2,size=984k;" \ "name=boot,size=128M,bootable;" \ "name=system,size=-;"

I assume that the intended use is

• loader1: SPL
• loader2: u-boot
• boot: Linux /boot
• system: Linux /

AFAIK the UEFI spec requires that the EFI system partition (ESP) is FAT-formatted. Most (probably all?) Linux package management tooling assumes that files from packages are installed onto filesystems that support POSIX semantics, including hardlinks, which FAT does not. This means that distributions cannot re-use an EFI system partition as /boot and therefore need a partition for /boot and an additional ESP (AFAIK commonly mounted to /boot/efi). I would therefore like to propose adding a small separate partition for use as ESP.

The original intent of the "boot" partition wasn't really to store /boot, but to be a FAT partition to store the environment + whatever data needed for the EFI partition.

Maybe we can rename it if it's confusing?

Maxime