1Gb EFI, rest of the disk LUKS with a single BTRFS inside. Use BTRFS subvols to divide things up. Swap as a swap file on BTRFS (be sure to set it as no_cow).
I prefer a very small EFI partition mounted at /boot/efi, that way the kernels and initrds sit at /boot alongside the rest ot the files (though if you also want encryption you need to add your encryption keys to initrd so you don’t have to enter the password twice)
Some distributions (e.g. NixOS) store their kernels on the EFI partition, going small will bite you on those. 1GB is a good size. The Windows default of 100MB is only enough to store two kernels.
Edit: This might actually be systemd-boot specific.
This is true. I used a 1gb boot partition on my Nixos install and every time I update it I need to delete all the old kernels/initrd and sometimes I even delete the one that’s currently running.
In many of my laptop setups I’ve also solidified around similar setup: 200 or 500 mb efi + luks with lvm with root and home volumes. Swap is a file which makes everything easy without having to care about another partition and is automatically encrypted since it stays on root.
Partition formats is always ext4 since there’s no need for anything else. Tried btrfs in the past and it had problems, more than it solved, and xfs years ago regularly had problems corrupting files when power went off. I swore on never using any of those 2 again.
And / is tmpfs, /home is tmpfs, /nix, /etc/nixos, /var/log, /home/$username/downloads, /home/$username/documents, and some other directories are ZFS subvolumes bind-mounted at boot. That’s only an option for NixOS or Guix though, so don’t worry about opt-in state on other distros.
1Gb EFI, rest of the disk LUKS with a single BTRFS inside. Use BTRFS subvols to divide things up. Swap as a swap file on BTRFS (be sure to set it as no_cow).
I prefer a very small EFI partition mounted at /boot/efi, that way the kernels and initrds sit at /boot alongside the rest ot the files (though if you also want encryption you need to add your encryption keys to initrd so you don’t have to enter the password twice)
Some distributions (e.g. NixOS) store their kernels on the EFI partition, going small will bite you on those. 1GB is a good size. The Windows default of 100MB is only enough to store two kernels.
Edit: This might actually be
systemd-bootspecific.This is true. I used a 1gb boot partition on my Nixos install and every time I update it I need to delete all the old kernels/initrd and sometimes I even delete the one that’s currently running.
I use NixOS, and read my comment again. /boot/efi is only for GRUB. /boot is where the actual kernels reside, and it isn’t on the EFI partition.
Might actually be
systemd-bootthing, not a NixOS specific thing, either way, this is where my kernels are:/boot/EFI/nixos/vnmrdbd7a5rg6482d6p8zxc57xf2nxqb-linux-6.1.44-bzImage.efi
/boot is straight up the EFI partition, there is no separate /boot partition.
yeah that’s probably because systemd-boot only supports FAT
*FAT32
I doubt it doesn’t support FAT16
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In many of my laptop setups I’ve also solidified around similar setup: 200 or 500 mb efi + luks with lvm with root and home volumes. Swap is a file which makes everything easy without having to care about another partition and is automatically encrypted since it stays on root.
Partition formats is always ext4 since there’s no need for anything else. Tried btrfs in the past and it had problems, more than it solved, and xfs years ago regularly had problems corrupting files when power went off. I swore on never using any of those 2 again.
Same, except ZFS instead of BTRFS for me.
And / is tmpfs, /home is tmpfs, /nix, /etc/nixos, /var/log, /home/$username/downloads, /home/$username/documents, and some other directories are ZFS subvolumes bind-mounted at boot. That’s only an option for NixOS or Guix though, so don’t worry about opt-in state on other distros.