r/Fedora•
noooit

Does anybody know why fedora doesn't support vfat/btrfs boot partition?

Is it possible in Fedora 32?

Posted Apr 10, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

19
kraytex•

The UEFI bootloader on your motherboard would have to support it. The UEFI spec currently mandates support for FAT, but a vendor could add support for other fileystems if they wanted to but AFAIK most don't.

4
noooitOP•

No, I'm not talking about esp(/boot/efi). It's already formatted as vfat. I'm taking about /boot which is at the moment xfs in my case. anaconda doesn't seem to allow it.

2
VersalEszett•

It's possible, but not every tool supports it. I've been running /boot on a btrfs subvolume for a few years now, and I converted it back to a separate ext4 partition just today.

If you create the partition after the installation yourself, copy the files, adapt /etc/fstab and your kernel command line, you should be good. You also need to disable BootloaderSpec (blscfg), since it cannot handle btrfs subvolumes correctly.

I have no idea why Fedora doesn't (want to) support it.

3
noooitOP•

i was quite surprised vfat wasn't supported by anaconda, while xfs does. it's very peculiar.
thanks for sharing.

1
ivanhoe1024•

I think vfat is not supported in such use cases since it doesn’t support Unix file permissions...

5
noooitOP•

at least vfat 32 is supported. i had boot and efi in the same partition. with pxeboot, /boot doesn't even exist.

1
[deleted]•

[removed]

-4
[deleted]•

[removed]

3
MindlessLeadership•

Fedora 32 actually supports /boot being a btrfs subvolume.

Just swap it in Anaconda at install time and it works.

1