All,

I'm trying to work out how to move / from a MBR with spinning disks to NVMe. The bios only boots from NVMe in UEFI mode, but supports booting from both UEFI and MBR in UEFI+Legacy mode. I've formatted the NVMe and set the optimal block size and created the ESP, / and swap partitions. I'm following along Migrate install to new hardware wiki [1] and using the installation guide [2].

The installation guide mounting of the ESP to /boot (/mnt/boot) seems to contradict what is documented in the EFI system partition wiki typical mount points where it describes the disadvantages of mounting ESP to /boot and suggests you mount ESP to /efi instead [3].

  The listed disadvantages include:

o This prevents setting file-specific permissions and/or extended attributes,
  o  This increases the size requirement for the ESP,
o This exposes the kernel and initramfs images to potentially hazardous manipulation from bootable drives or other operating systems when dual-booting,
  o  This makes encrypting /boot impossible, and
o This makes root volume snapshots (using Btrfs, Bcachefs, ZFS, LVM) less effective as /boot content would not be included.

Currently the system is booting from the MBR hard drives and I'm just setting up the NVMe before booting the Arch install media and then copying / to new NVMe. Going forward, what is the current recommended mount of ESP in this situation, /boot or /efi?


[1] Migrate install to new hardware
    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Migrate_installation_to_new_hardware

[2] 1.11 Mount the file systems
    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

[3] 4.1 Typical mount points
    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFI_system_partition


--
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.

Reply via email to