On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 8:50 AM Chris Green <[email protected]> wrote: > > [...] > Why is /boot a separate partition? On my other trixie system (not > EFI) everything is just one partition. Both systems were installed > 'from scratch' and I just let the installer do default partitioning. > Does EFI really need to be so much more complicated?
In the old days (like 20 years ago), /boot was a separate partition to arrange its physical location on the drive. /boot needed to be near the beginning of the drive so grub could load properly, or grub could load the kernel properly. Drive geometry had something to do with it, and I believe Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) played a big part of it, before linear addressing of large drives was ubiquitous. Nowadays, on EFI systems, /boot could be a separate partition because the EFI spec says the system partition is fat32. Some folks make /boot fat32, while other folks make /boot/efi fat32. My guess is your two Trixie systems have different configurations because one is a MBR system, and one is an EFI system. (A lot of this has mostly faded from my memory, so corrections, please). Jeff
