Installer creates and uses empty efi-partition with bios-setup

[orcus-de]

mint-20-cinnamon (64bit) The Installer creates an empty 512MB volume which is mounted at /boot/efi at the installed OS.

Using qemu/kvm with an empty/new virtual disk:

Perform installation with an bios (non-efi) setup: Default installation: use entire disk, default ext4 fs, no lvm, no luks, no ecryptfs no drivers installed german keyboard setup - english locales - german/berlin tz

Result after boot:

lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
vda 252:0 0 15G 0 disk ├─vda1 252:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi ├─vda2 252:2 0 1K 0 part └─vda5 252:5 0 14,5G 0 part /

sudo ls -al /boot/efi/ total 8 drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 . drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jun 12 18:33 ..

cat_ /etc/fstab .... UUID=F35C-AFEC /boot/efi vfat umask=0077 0 1 ...

expected result: no efi-partition being setup with a bios-setup using mbr-style partitioning

note: if the installer would allow to use a gpt-style partition-table (at a later version), a bios-partition might be required - which is not the case atm

[clefebvre]

Thanks @orcus-de, it looks harmless to me. I'm not sure whether that's a change or an oversight on partman-auto or ubiquity but it looks upstream from us.

[Wilhelm79]

Hi Clem,

Can attest that's an Ubuntu upsteam bug as it appeared on the 20.04 Ubiquity installer while creating a new install (same as orcus-de : ext4, full-disk scheme, no lvm, LUKS...etc) on a legacy/BIOS system.

Cheers (and thanks for this new release !!)

[clefebvre]

Thanks @Wilhelm79

[orcus-de]

yup - agree on: it shouldn't affect anything in a negative way - it's just an empty partition being mounted - just a bit surprising.