I have a new laptop with preinstalled Windows 10. I'd like to make it dual-boot with Ubuntu (20.04). To make things simple, I only created 3 mount points /swap, / and /home in the allocated space for the Ubuntu. After finishing the installation, I realised that Ubuntu also mounts the /boot/efi in the same boot partition with Windows.
Is it normal? What would be the impacts? Would it recommended to have create a separate partition to mount /boot?
1 Answer
Generally a UEFI system has just one EFI System Partition (ESP), which in Linux usually gets mounted to /boot/efi. Confirm that with just mount command: /boot isn't a separate mount point, but /boot/efi is. And since system has just one ESP, that's the same ESP Windows uses. You should have there /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT, /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft, /boot/efi/EFI/Ubuntu, something like this.
As for separate /swap, it does no harm, but may make hibernating Linux less painful. Also it is better because it is simpler, swap file is a file and is routed via swap code AND file system code, and busy file system might make it slower. You can avoid this file system code, why not take this shorter path? This is why I only use swap files as last resort and always recommend to use swap only on separate partitions or volumes.
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