Nicely Nitpick Noble 24.04 LTS

[jglen490]

At this late in the release cycle, and with the current install issues, looks like waiting for 24.04.1 LTS may be prudent.

[jlittle]

I had a go this afternoon at installing Noble, not specifying an ESP thus avoiding boot loader problems. It was a struggle, the installer kept crashing.

• The first was the "networkcfg/main.py" problem discussed above, first reported over a month ago. I applied the workaround in the bug report.
• Then it was fstab/main.py, specific to btrfs, trying to change attributes on a swap file. The installer does not have a way to say no swap file; one can say no to a swap partition, or yes, either way a swap file is set up in a subvolume @swap mounted on /swap. By using

sudo calamares -d

I identified the line that was crashing, that run chattr on the swap file, and commented it out.

• There was another crash to do with the swap file, so I tried a few more times with variations on having a swap partition and whether to format it. One attempt succeeded.

I just happened to have a spare volume that I was happy experimenting with; I didn't want to risk trashing my main Kubuntu install by installing Noble into the same btrfs. However, on the spare volume I used there were a few installs, and they appear to have been unaffected.

[NoWorries]

After all the problems I had with re-installing Noble and dealing with the 300 MiiB limit, I lost my Windows option in my boot options. So at the moment I have Noble and a re-installed Mantic showing on my boot options. For this system I did the following in superuser mode for my efi partition:

root@user:/boot/efi# du efi -ah
2.5M    efi/ubuntu/grubx64.efi
940K    efi/ubuntu/shimx64.efi
844K    efi/ubuntu/mmx64.efi
4.0K    efi/ubuntu/BOOTX64.CSV
4.0K    efi/ubuntu/grub.cfg
4.3M    efi/ubuntu
940K    efi/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI
88K     efi/BOOT/fbx64.efi
844K    efi/BOOT/mmx64.efi
1.9M    efi/BOOT
6.1M    efi
root@user:/boot/efi#
​

When I add up all these numbers, I get 26.456 MiB. Even if you add 100 MiB for Windows, this is much less than 300 MiB!

I just hope that those who deal with the developers can convince them to either modify the Calamares installer or revert to the Ubiquity install for Noble. After all, Ubiquity works well with Mantic after I had to re-install it following my problems with the Calamares installer and it also worked well when I used an early version of Noble with the Ubiquity installer.

[jglen490]

My EFI is in /boot/efi. The rest of /boot is under / with everything else system-related. THBOMU, EFI gets bootstrapped, and then calls grub which brings in the kernel.

[oshunluvr]

I went back over the discussion and it's systemd-boot that uses a separate /boot partition which includes the EFI stuff along with the kernels and etc. In that occasion, you would definitely need a much larger partition - but it's not a /boot/EFI partition it's a /boot partition.

[oshunluvr]

It may be a useful default if more than /boot/efi is used. Maybe on systems that have different forms of FDE available? It likely is as much a legacy sort of thing, like the "use 1.5x the amount of ram for swap" thing
I see MInt using 500. I don't recall how much my Fedora laptop was using.

I remember someone saying that some distros Pop!-OS put kernels or something in the efi partition thus requiring more space. I can't recall exactly, but it seemed odd at the time.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Another observation in today's Kubuntu 24.04 (Dev) : Mesa is still at 24.0.1 and I hope that it will be at least at 24.0.3 for release…

[claydoh]

It may be a useful default if more than /boot/efi is used. Maybe on systems that have different forms of FDE available? It likely is as much a legacy sort of thing, like the "use 1.5x the amount of ram for swap" thing
I see MInt using 500. I don't recall how much my Fedora laptop was using.

[cookiemuncher]

Mine is pretty small

/dev/sda6 vfat 96M 39M 58M 41% /boot/efi

[oshunluvr]

to make this clear for everyone -> we are not talking about a /boot partition here, but about what in the average Linux installation is mounted to /boot/efi.

Excellent thing to point out. Not everyone drills down deep enough into this topic to realize what exactly we're referring to.

As to NoWorries point, I think often the developer(s) may take the easier path of just picking a default rather than offering yet another option for some less experienced user to get confused or make a poor choice of. Referring to the above comment, I could see a novice confusing /boot/efi with /boot and making the partition size many GBs rather than a few MBs.

Still, I have no clue way anyone would think more than 200MB is necessary, but that amount of wasted space is inconsequential these days given drive sizes.

I have an older Asus "ChromeBox" which I hacked and install Kubuntu 18.04 on several years ago. it has a 128G M.2 ssd in it and a 512M efi partition. I can't recall if that was the installer's default or I decided to use that much. It was my first EFI installation so either is just as likely. Regardless, the "wasted" 200-300M isn't worth the hassle of resizing the partitions to recover.

EDIT: I do find it humorous the Windows users will argue for 512-1024M for EFI when MS suggests only 100M.

[Schwarzer Kater]

oshunluvr : That is exactly what I also have found out and observed - but I still could not name a technical reason for 300MB and above like e.g. Kubuntu 24.04's installer demands it!

For example:
the totally used space on my three ESPs combined (on three different drives) of one of my computers here is "only" 138 MB - for 1x Windows 10 installation and 13x Linux installations…

But the behaviour of some Linux installers is why I have been recommending 304-320MB for an ESP for some time now.

Edit:
to make this clear for everyone -> we are not talking about a /boot partition here, but about what in the average Linux installation is mounted to /boot/efi.

[NoWorries]

Thanks very much for your systematic analysis. I must say that the ubiquity installer is a far more polite installer than the latest Calamares installer. I just hope that the insistence on 300 MiB is removed as new users wanting to try Noble may have problems which put them off trying Noble. This also overlooks the current problem with the install crashing and needing to edit the main.py file.

[oshunluvr]

These 300MB have been the minimum ESP size in several distributions' installers for some time now, many (but not all) of them using the Calamares installer.
I also have wondered what the technical reason is, but found no satisfying answer.

I had a discussion at length on reddit about this topic. It seems (as usual maybe) that both sides of the issue (minimal vs. excessive) had valid points. The deeper issue may be that no one has actually set a standard. IMO it depends a lot on whether one uses strictly Linux vs. a mixed environment. Microsith "recommends" 100 MB. My Lenovo laptop with Windows 10 pre-installed had a 256MB EFI partition and currently has Windows 10 and Kubuntu 22.04 installed. So I pulled it out and booted up and here's where it's at:

/efi/BOOT = 3.1 mb
/efi/EFI/Boot = 1.9 mb
/efi/EFI/Microsoft = 26 mb
/efi/EFI/ubuntu = 4.3 mb

There's also an inconsequential amount of "$RECYCLE.BIN" and "System Volume Information." "df" reports a total of 35 mb used on the /boot/efi partition.

Anyway, it seems if you're strictly a Winblows user, 100 MB is probably fine. Even less if you're a single Linux distro user. If you multiboot several Linux distros AND Win-D'oh-s then 256 or up might be a good idea.

I've never seen a valid reason to go beyond that. Honestly, I could install 3-4 more Linux distros and still be under 100 mb.

[Schwarzer Kater]

These 300MB have been the minimum ESP size in several distributions' installers for some time now, many (but not all) of them using the Calamares installer.
I also have wondered what the technical reason is, but found no satisfying answer.

[jglen490]

... The problem that I faced was with calamares installer as against the ubiquity installer. The main problem that I faced was that the EFI partition had to be 300 MiB in size and mine was 275 MiB. ...

Really? My EFI is 100 MB, and has been for a long time! The contents weigh in at 6.1 MB. Have to wonder what's driving this