Arch Linux

Skeleton2323

Member

Registered: 2024-09-14

Posts: 19

[SOLVED] EFI part. as /boot directory with another /boot dir. in root

I hope that this title makes sense... basically what's going on since the very first time I installed arch (official guide), the EFI partition is also used as the /boot directory which I do not want since its only 100 MB and I don't want to resize it because I have to resize and move the NTFS windows partition.

I'd like the /boot directory to be a standard directory in the root directory and not the EFI partition being used as a /boot directory since whenever there's a new kernel released, space runs out on the EFI partition and the installation craps itself out.

My problem is that whenever I unmount /dev/nvme0n1p1 (the EFI partition), the /boot directory doesn't become inaccessible but appears to be showing another/boot directory, possibly one that's actually stored in root which contains GRUB configurations. Whenever I unmount the partition and then run pacman -Syu, that's when the kernel update succeeds. If I don't, it presumably tries to install the kernel in the EFI partition and space runs out and it cannot mount /boot

How do I stop arch from automatically mounting the efi partition and using it as /boot?

Last edited by Skeleton2323 (2024-10-11 20:26:32)

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 1,382

Re: [SOLVED] EFI part. as /boot directory with another /boot dir. in root

remove it from or change it's mountpoint in /etc/fstab to something like /efi or /boot/efi (make sure these folders exist)
when something shows up in /boot after you unmount ESP this there're data in it that gets shadowed by the mount
btw: 100mb is enough - just remove the fallback from /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset - the kernel is only 13mb with a default initrd about 34mb = about 50mb with windows bootloader about 25mb = about 75mb total

Skeleton2323

Member

Registered: 2024-09-14

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] EFI part. as /boot directory with another /boot dir. in root

hey, that fixed it right up! thanks

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 1,382

Re: [SOLVED] EFI part. as /boot directory with another /boot dir. in root

btw: for several reasons care should be take depending on layout and mountpoints:

- if the ESP only contains the bootloader like grub, systemd-boot, refind ... and is mounted to /efi or /boot/efi there's no real need to have it always mounted via fstab or systemd-automount - but attention has to be payed on updates if there's an update for the bootloader
- if the ESP contains also the kernel and init ramdisk and hence is mounted to /boot although there's no actual need for it should be consider to have it auto mounted via fstab or systemd-automount as arch is a rolling release with kernel updates often
- if you use secureboot - SNAKE OIL! - just disable it - it's broken by design and doesn't have any real benefit as it would require EVERYTHING signed and validated like every binary and config - it breaks at the point when you can run any given binary after login or feed unsigned configs into signed binaries - as at this point you can pretty much completely disable it from within the running OS and gained exactly NOTHIN over just disable and not using it in the first place
- if you have anything more fancy than a flat boot and root partition like lvm, luks, btrfs - yea, uhm, why you do this to yourself? at least keep your system bootable - if you have something to hide use something userland