Nowadays you don’t even need a /boot unless you’re doing full disk encryption and I actually recommend keeping /boot on / if you’re doing BTRFS root snapshots. Being able to include your kernel images in your snapshots makes rollbacks painlessly easy.
UEFI forum made it a requirement for motherboard constructors (hp, dell, msi…) to make their UEFI implementation to be able to at least read fat(12/16/32) filesystems. That is why you need a fat(12/16/32) partition flagged ESP (efi system partition) for holding your boot files.
So, I dont think you can do that unless you fall back to the old outdated BIOS or you have some *nix filesystem in your uefi implementation which I dont trust.
You’re only partially correct. /boot doesn’t have to also be your EFI partition. In fact, most distros by default will separate the two, with the EFI partition mounted at /boot/efi and /boot being a separate ext4 based partition. My suggestion is that, if you’re running BTRFS, you should merge /boot and / as one partition. You’re still free to have a FAT32-based EFI mounted at /boot/efi or better yet /efi.
I use systemd-boot and my mount point is /efi. /efi/EFI/ is where my bootloaders live.
If I rollback to an old enough snapshot, I have to reinstall my kernels from a chroot. It’d be cool if I could get around that.
I’ve heard that you have to put in your encryption pw twice if you do it that way no?
Out of curiosity, what’s stopping you from shrinking the partition and adding a swap partition?
