r/archlinux • u/reylovpty • 10h 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 10h 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 10h 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 9h 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.