EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

Whaleyy · 2021-12-25 01:37:17

Hello, I managed to get my Arch Linux up and running today, but I have a question regarding my EFI Partition. So, I have an NVME with 250GB size and an SSD with 1TB size, and since I did not have an EFI partition (wiped everything), I created one in my NVME with 1G size but then I partitioned the other stuff like the root and home directory in my SSD because it has a larger space than the NVME. So my question is, should my EFI Partition be on the same drive as my other partitions? Like, does the EFI partition needs to be created for the SSD instead and not the NVME? When I boot it up, everything works the same, I did it on SSD before but I wanted to separate it from my SSD.

This is how I partitioned mine btw, I used LVM because I know I'll be resizing the volume size and having to used it before, I really like it.

https://imgur.com/EseWItl/

Thank you in advance.

Last edited by Whaleyy (2021-12-25 01:42:25)

Trilby · 2021-12-25 02:02:19

Well the direct answer to your question is that it is okay to have the efi and other partitions on different devices as long as your boot manager supports this setup (several do, a few do not).

But everything else about this is rather absurd. Why on earth would you have a 1GB efi partition? And then why in this galaxy would you have a 150G root partition (given that there's a separate /home). These are just obscenely large and not even a small fraction of that space could ever be used.

Whaleyy · 2021-12-25 02:30:48

Trilby wrote:

Well the direct answer to your question is that it is okay to have the efi and other partitions on different devices as long as your boot manager supports this setup (several do, a few do not).
But everything else about this is rather absurd. Why on earth would you have a 1GB efi partition? And then why in this galaxy would you have a 150G root partition (given that there's a separate /home). These are just obscenely large and not even a small fraction of that space could ever be used.

Thank you for clarifying. As for the size of my EFI and root partition, I just thought it's best to have that extra space in case it might go over. Initially, the size of my EFI partition is 550MB and 50GB for my root partition, but then the size of my home partition seems absurdly large, so I thought to myself, who knows one day my root partition might go over. Nevertheless, I can resize it to 80GB root partition and 600MB EFI partition if the size of those partitions sound reasonable.

Last edited by Whaleyy (2021-12-25 02:54:53)

Trilby · 2021-12-25 03:02:32

The difference is a home partition can grow unchecked - neither a efi or root partition could. The kernel and boot manager isn't one day going to suddently take up 17 times as much space as it does now - even if you double, triple, or quadruple boot, 1G for efi would never be used. Similar for the root partition - the amount taken up can change based on which packages you install, but even if you install every package you ever heard of, you'd have a hard time filling up 150G if you were trying to ... I dont think it'd even be possible.

That said, there certainly is no one right answer to how big these should be. But it is worth thinking about what you expect to use them for, and which one have potential to fill up over time (and which ones don't).

Last edited by Trilby (2021-12-25 03:03:54)

Whaleyy · 2021-12-25 03:15:02

Trilby wrote:

The difference is a home partition can grow unchecked - neither a efi or root partition could. The kernel and boot manager isn't one day going to suddently take up 17 times as much space as it does now - even if you double, triple, or quadruple boot, 1G for efi would never be used. Similar for the root partition - the amount taken up can change based on which packages you install, but even if you install every package you ever heard of, you'd have a hard time filling up 150G if you were trying to ... I dont think it'd even be possible.
That said, there certainly is no one right answer to how big these should be. But it is worth thinking about what you expect to use them for, and which one have potential to fill up over time (and which ones don't).

Ohhh I see now, I mean, it grows right, but it won't really take up that much of a space. Also, I'm using this as my main OS (not dual-boot), that's why I gave those partitions an absurd size even though it's not going to take up even half of the space.

Also, even if I use the efi partition as /boot, it still won't go up to 1GB right?

Last edited by Whaleyy (2021-12-25 03:18:09)

V1del · 2021-12-25 12:10:11

You'd have to install around 10 kernels for getting close to 1GB

Lone_Wolf · 2021-12-25 13:18:23

about the root parition (after I ran paccache -r ):

$ df -h /dev/nvme0n1p1
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p1   75G   43G   29G  60% /
$

The top 4 largest things are /var/cache with 11.1 GiB, /var/lib at 8.7 GiB, /swapfile of 8 GiB and /var/log at 4.7 Gib .

Trilby · 2021-12-25 14:47:00

Whaleyy wrote:

Also, I'm using this as my main OS (not dual-boot), that's why I gave those partitions an absurd size even though it's not going to take up even half of the space.
Also, even if I use the efi partition as /boot, it still won't go up to 1GB right?

Half?? No, on a single-boot system with the efi partition as /boot you wouldn't even use 1/17th of that. That's why I was shocked. Not just that there's extra space, but that there's a ridiculous amount of extra space - more than an order of magnitude more than you'd ever need for dual boot system let alone a single boot.

Admittedly root partition sizes can be a bit more subjective. But Lone_Wolfs numbers above don't really make sense. Lone_Wolf, what's eating all that /var space? That's definitely not normal. My /var on all of my arch systems is in the range of 2G, I could see it going up a fair bit on systems with a lot more installed, but if your logs are taking up multiple GBs, it's likely because some error is spamming them and should be fixed.

Last edited by Trilby (2021-12-25 14:49:37)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2021-12-25 18:17:05

Containers and suchlike can take up significant space on the root partition, as can flatpaks. But I agree that 150GiB does seem a little excessive.

Lone_Wolf · 2021-12-26 13:35:01

Dug a bit further and the culprits are
/var/lib/archbuild/extra-x86_64 3.3 GiB
/var/lib/archbuild/multilib-x86_64 4.4 GiB
/var/log/journal/some-hash/ 78 files, 4 GiB

The first two are from building stuff in a chroot, which is likely to also play a role in the big pkg cache from pacman.

The third is systemd-journal for system & user, and those are very spammy indeed even with audit logging disabled.

Trilby · 2021-12-26 16:22:57

Lone_Wolf wrote:

The first two are from building stuff in a chroot...

Ah, I don't have experience with that to know what'd be normal size, there, but as that accounts for almost 8G, that difference brings the numbers back into a very reasonable range (along with a bit of log spam). I'd gather /var/lib is also bloated due to chroot buld content(?) as /var/lib on all my systems is in the range of 130M.

Last edited by Trilby (2021-12-26 16:24:25)

Arch Linux

#1 2021-12-25 01:37:17

EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#2 2021-12-25 02:02:19

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#3 2021-12-25 02:30:48

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#4 2021-12-25 03:02:32

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#5 2021-12-25 03:15:02

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#6 2021-12-25 12:10:11

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#7 2021-12-25 13:18:23

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#8 2021-12-25 14:47:00

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#9 2021-12-25 18:17:05

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#10 2021-12-26 13:35:01

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

#11 2021-12-26 16:22:57

Re: EFI Partition on NVME and the rest on SSD

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