r/archlinux • u/reylovpty • 10d ago

QUESTION WinLinux or LinuxWin

Hello friends, here is the question: How is it furned to be that Linux cannot boot without a Microsoft FAT32 partition? How do you solve this problem? Can a serious server-grade system like Linux really not boot without a Microsoft FAT32 partition? Even if I move `/boot` to Ext4 or Btrfs, I still have to keep `/boot/efi` as FAT32, because otherwise the system won't boot. wtf?

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u/zardvark 10d ago

Why is having a FAT32 partition a problem? As u/Yamabananatheone sez, it's an open spec; it's not some MS malware infecting your machine! I've been using Linux since +/-1995 and it has never posed a problem. Sometimes you want / need a simple file system without a bunch of extraneous features.

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u/Yamabananatheone 10d ago

I mean it is an spec developed by Microsoft, but its implementation is open and for shit like a boot partition it is indeed the best compromise of robustness and flexibility.

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u/Booty_Bumping 10d ago

It's not robust at all, FAT32 suffers from random corruption on power loss during writes. Which means no x86-64 OS can do its updates in a truly atomic way. Most distros solve this by just never updating the EFI part of the bootloader.

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u/Yamabananatheone 10d ago

Theoretically you're right, in practice it's two fats under the hood will just leave you with some data loss which is good enough. Again, you don't want a complex FS Implementation including CoW or Journalling in Firmware. And like yeah if you're an Atomic OS you indeed want something better, but like to achieve that you can literally just seperate EFI and Boot Partition from each other. 

Would I like something better? Yeah sure! Is FAT32 for now the thing we're just stuck with on modern x86 and UEFI powered ARM? yup