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is /boot folder supposed to be empty?
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davidshen84
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 02, 2025 5:26 am    Post subject: is /boot folder supposed to be empty? Reply with quote

Hi,

I have separated ESP and XBOOT partitions, and they are mounted on /efi and /boot respectively. I use UKI layout, and I use dracut to create the UKI. After I executed "boot ctrl install" and rebooted the system, it booted and seemed to work. I mounted ESP to /efi and found this folder layout:

Code:
Permissions Size User Group Date Modified Name
drwxr-xr-x     - root root   1 Jan  1970  /efi
.rwxr-xr-x     0 root root  19 Sep  2021  ├── .keep
drwxr-xr-x     - root root   1 Feb 13:20  ├── EFI
drwxr-xr-x     - root root   1 Feb 13:40  ├── grub
.rwxr-xr-x  122M root root  26 Jan 13:01  ├── initramfs-6.6.67-gentoo-dist.img
.rwxr-xr-x   18M root root  26 Jan 13:04  ├── kernel-6.6.67-gentoo-dist
drwxr-xr-x     - root root   2 Feb 15:36  ├── loader


However, after I mounted XBOOT to /boot, I found it was empty. Is this correct? Also, if it is supposed to be empty, then why do we need it?


Thanks
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Zucca
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 02, 2025 2:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It looks like you have all the necessary files under /efi, including kernel. To me it seems correct for /boot to be empty then.
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davidshen84
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 03, 2025 2:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks, good to know I am safe.

But I'm very confused, what's the purpose of the boot partition?
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Banana
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 03, 2025 6:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It is now a historical setting, which still has its usage.
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In the first computers, there was a limitation in the BIOS firmware used during start-up. The firmware restricted access exclusively to the first 1024 sectors of storage in the hard drive. Thus, it was impossible to boot an operating system from a partition located after that.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_boot_partition
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Zucca
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 03, 2025 8:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I still use /boot instead of /efi.

I simply have my /boot partition formatted to vfat. It pretty much contains everything OP has in /efi.

Some people split the efi stuff and linux boot files so they may have both /boot and /efi (or even /boot/efi).
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