Honestly, it’s a pretty easy question, but Googling does not give a simple answer.
There’s Grub2, there’s Fedora, and there’s other stuff.
I (and anyone else who just want to know the answer) just want that answer,
and maybe also the links for the sources.
I came to ask because I am about to reinstall Fedora, so I want to know how much space it actually occupies..
There is no simple answer to this question because it varies. My Fedora install is currently using about 300MB in /boot. But that doesn’t mean yours will. The initrds live in /boot and vary in size depending on what drivers and software end up in the initrd. Also, if you install additional kernels, you can end up with more initrds.
Lastly, between distros it depends pretty drastically. One of my Arch installs is using ~300KB because there is basically nothing in it. I have seen other installs of distros with over 1.5 GBs in /boot
This is way more than good enough.
Thank you.
This means that a 5gb /boot , even for dual-booting Distros, will basically last longer than “the SSD has left to live”.
Yes, that would be plenty. I usually use 2GiB and that has been enough for me, even when multi-booting.
I highly recommend using at least 2 GB, see this thread for details: Systems with <=1 GB /boot partition may see "need more space" error during system update
If you want it to live as long as your SSD will, 5GB is a solid choice.
Just to add - dual-booting shouldn’t be a concern here, as your Fedora boot partition will only contain Fedora files.
The EFI partition is shared between OSes, but Fedora only uses about 7 MiB there (for the GRUB EFI binaries). Fedora / Windows dual-boot systems typically seem to have a 300 - 600 MiB EFI partition, which is comfortably more than enough.
I am currently too tired to properly respond to this post, but I believe this conversation may be better followed in this new post I made, for a different, but tangentially connected issue:
Is there any reason you want to set the whole /boot in a different partition?
That was required in very old systems, maybe even before Grub, on Lilo boot manager.
Nowadays the necessary files for UEFI boot are in /boot/efi. It should be in a separate partition, since it uses vfat filesystem. Fedora installer already suggests that one and 200 MiB are probably enough for it.
I don’t know if I understood completely your other issue, but if you set one EFI partition for Fedora and let Windows create its own, if anything goes wrong you could change the preferred system to boot in the UEFI configuration. So keep 2 separate EFI partitions, one for each system.
Do it at your own risk, ok? I probably don’t need to say it, but backup your files or disable/remove any important drives if you’re not that confident.
Good luck.
On openSUSE Tumbleweed my boot folder is about 45MB (not a separate partition):
Image: /boot/initrd-6.18.2-1-default: 38M
I have a separate /boot/efi partition and its use is tiny (516K out of 1G):
/dev/nvme0n1p1 vfat 1022M 516K 1022M 1% /boot/efi
On F43 Workstation I did /boot/efi at 64M, no separate /boot
If your root partition is ext4, then you can choose not to have a separate /boot partition. You can just have /boot as a normal directory on your root partition.
If your root partition is btrfs (which is the default in Fedora), then you should have a separate ext4 /boot partition, because some GRUB features aren’t fully supported on btrfs. That may be remedied fairly soon, by adopting a patch developed by openSUSE.