On Monday, 6 April 2020 22:15:20 BST Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Mon, 6 Apr 2020 22:02:04 +0100, antlists wrote: > > > This isn't strictly true, the ESP must be vfat, but you can still > > > have an ext? /boot. > > > > This isn't true at all - you've got the cart before the horse. The > > original (U)EFI spec comes from Sun, I believe, with no vfat in sight. > > > > A standards-compliant factory-fresh Mac boots using UEFI with no vfat > > in sight. > > That's true, but firmware on commodity PC motherboards can only be relied > upon to handle vfat. So while my use of "must" is a bit strong, it should > be vfat if you want to be sure it will boot on a PC.
Perhaps older UEFI specifications allowed Mac-baked filesystems, or perhaps Apple were/are doing their own thing. The current UEFI specification *requires* a FAT 12/16/32 filesystem type on an ESP partition to boot an OS image/bootloader from - see section '13.3 File System Format': https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Spec_2_8_final.pdf I can't recall the ESP partition format last time I installed and dual-booted Linux on a MacBookPro, c.2014, but I'd wager it was VFAT.
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