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I installed Arch linux after Windows on my laptop. Recently, I am getting a warning that my boot partition is low on space. These are the files in /boot

29M /boot/EFI
7.9M    /boot/grub
31M /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
9.6M    /boot/initramfs-linux.img
6.7M    /boot/MHCOVERY.BIN
3.0K    /boot/System Volume Information
8.6M    /boot/vmlinuz-linux

I am still unsure what the fallback is for. Should I remove it? Alternatively, I could resize the partition table and increase the size of /boot to 300MB. This however could be tricky since the partition after boot is for Windows.

user171558
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1 Answers1

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In UEFI systems, EFI partition is used to keep "bootloaders" (in fact, EFI apps) that boot operating systems.

In your case, it seems that EFI partition is shared between Linux (mounted as /boot) and Windows (here it does not get a drive letter, unless you assign one manually).

The minimum size for non-shared EFI partition is 100 MB per Microsoft recommendations. Sometimes it is recommended to set it up to 550MB. If you use Bitlocker, recommended size is at least 300MB (unless you have a separate WinRE partition). That's Windows world only.

With Linux, you also have bootloader + kernel here, in /boot. When updating, the old kernel most likely will also be backed up here, thus consuming the space further.

In your case, I would recommend resizing EFI partition to have at least 100MB free space available. For 1TB+ drives, I recommend setting EFI partition size to 500MB+, depending what Windows and Linux features you use (Bitlocker etc), but definitely not less than 300MB.

simon
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