Qubes installer wants to create a tiny EFI partition...?

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I’m installing Qubes 4.3 onto a 1TB drive. During the partitioning step if I choose automatic, and reclaim space, I get this layout:

  • 1 MB efi
  • 1 GB boot
  • 20 GB dom0 /
  • (and then the rest)

That surprised me, as I have it in my head the default Qubes EFI partition size is 600 MB, and indeed that’s what I have on my existing Qubes computer (also 1TB, different make) on which I did a fresh 4.3 install a little while ago.

If I choose custom, and then on the next screen clear any existing partitions and allow the installer to suggest new starter partitions for me, again it puts forward a 1 MB efi. And if I try to change it to 600 MB (or any figure), click the apply button, it just reverts to 1 MB again. The boot and root partitions I can resize on this screen, but not efi. I assume I can get past this on the advanced gui, but I haven’t tried yet.

Before I head to qubes-issues, is there any chance the installer is doing something intelligent? Does a 1 MB efi partition make sense ever? or is this a software/hardware misfunction?

2

this should be the default - and that’s a result of a clean/new 4.3 installation:

Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-root   20G  5.2G   14G  28% /
/dev/nvme0n1p2               974M  294M  613M  33% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p1               599M   35M  564M   6% /boot/efi

Are you sure that the old partitons are successfully deleted - if any?

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3

Hi Euwiiwueir & Zrubi

Can you try:

ls /sys/firmware/efi

– it should show if your system is booting EFI or BIOS … and maybe the installer just creates a 1M EFI, if it detects a BIOS boot (?)

:slight_smile:

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user@dom0:~$ ls /sys/firmware/efi/
config_table  efivars  esrt  fw_platform_size  systab
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As far as I remember, that happens if the installer detects BIOS boot and you let it create a system disk with GPT formatting. In this case, the 1 MB EFI partition is needed to allow the BIOS to access the GPT layout. But beware: This does not work on all BIOSes!

If you are using BIOS boot, you can force the installer to use MBR disk partitioning if you do not erase all partitions on the target disk but format it with MBR and then let one partition remain before installing Qubes.

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6

Hi GWeck :slight_smile:

Thanks for the insights – I only had a guess about what could be the reason … and it makes perfect sense (to me) …

:slight_smile:

7

Indeed the installer partitioning step calls the 1MB efi partition “BIOS Boot”.

user@dom0:~$ ls /sys/firmware/efi
ls: cannot access '/sys/firmware/efi': No such file or directory

Thanks for the explanation. This computer is using coreboot w/ Heads.

So sounds like everything is fine, and the installer is doing something intelligent after all :slight_smile:

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