Jeffrey Walton <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > Yes, that's probably right. As I said I just let the installer provide a 'standard' installation on both systems and ended up with a different disk layout on each.
Anyway I created a gparted USB stick this afternoon and used it to reduce the main (/) partition's size by 1.5Gb and added the resulting extra space to the /boot partition. It took a **long** time to move the 1Tb / partition along a bit (several hours) but it all worked very smoothly and I now have lots of spare space in /boot. -- Chris Green ·
