Is /boot/efi a mandatory mountpoint with UEFI installs?

General system EndeavourOS installation
1

After moving my main system’s (XFCE) EFI partition to /boot, I’m in the process of doing the same with my test DE VMs. No problems with KDE or Cinnamon. Now I’m trying to do a clean install with LXQT, selecting /boot as FAT32 with the boot flag, same as I’ve done on every EOS system I’ve built. The installer complains that I’m not using /boot/efi, but I politely ignored this warning.

After the install is complete - no errors shown, but I wasn’t watching the console log - I rebooted to a system that did not have a Grub entry in EFI installed. I manually installed Grub via arch-chroot and the system came up fine.

Is this behavior normal? Since Arch recommends using /boot for EFI, why doesn’t EOS?

2

I am not sure why it wouldn’t work without looking at the code.

One easy solution would be to edit /etc/calamares/modules/partition.conf before launching the installer and change the EFI path near the top of the file.

That being said, mounting your ESP at /boot when using grub works but it is a very strange thing to do. It is also not the best choice from my perspective. I can’t think of any advantage, only disadvantages.

Are you sure that documentation isn’t intended for doing systemd-boot installs, not grub?

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The Arch Wiki for Grub references this link about mounting the EFI partition - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFI_system_partition#Mount_the_partition - where /boot or /efi are recommended. There are (2) reasons why I’ve chosen to do this:

  1. If I decide to return to systemd-boot, then I’m one step ahead of the game
  2. Grub still has issues when /boot is located on a BTRFS partition, so combining EFI with /boot makes sense for me
4

This worked perfectly - thank you!

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