https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BiggerESP

This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes
process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive
community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved
by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

== Summary ==

The Fedora installer includes an EFI System Partition of between 200MB
and 600MB by default, of which the lower size is much too small for
firmware updates on modern hardware and also for future bootloader
features like UKI.
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.

== Owner ==
* Name: [[User:rhughes| Richard Hughes]]
* Email: rich...@hughsie.com


== Detailed Description ==

Modern hardware has UEFI firmware updates that are more than 64MB in
size. The OEMs recommend a ESP free space of double the flash size
plus 20MB and fwupd now enforces this requirement to ensure flash
success. As the ESP is often shared between Windows and Linux, and
also used for firmware updates, and soon to be used by UKIs it's not
enough to just allocate a few hundreds of megabytes. Windows 10 and 11
allocates an ESP of at least 500MiB. Arch also specifies a minimum of
512 MiB.

== Feedback ==

There is no alternative -- the ESP has to scale up if we want firmware
updates to continue to work and to support UKIs for next-generation
bootloaders.

== Benefit to Fedora ==

Firmware updates will work on future hardware, and we can boot the
kernel using UKIs using next-generation bootloaders.

== Scope ==
* Proposal owners:

We need to change a number in Anaconda:
https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/4711

== Upgrade/compatibility impact ==

We can't grow the ESP in size, and so this change will only affect new
installs. This is fine, as this will affect new hardware more than old
hardware.

== How To Test ==

Install Fedora and observe that /boot/efi has at least 276MB free
space, even when installed alongside Windows.

== Dependencies ==

Anaconda would need to be modified, and Fedora would have a / or /home
partition that's ~300MB smaller by default than it is now.

== Contingency Plan ==

* Contingency mechanism: (What to do?  Who will do it?) N/A (not a
System Wide Change)
* Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
* Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change), No

== Documentation ==

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

== Release Notes ==

Fedora now defaults to a larger EFI System Partition which allows
firmware updates to work on newer hardware, and allows future
bootloader and kernel modernizations.


-- 
Ben Cotton
He / Him / His
Fedora Program Manager
Red Hat
TZ=America/Indiana/Indianapolis
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