From my recent experiences, I can say with assurance that a Windows/Linux dual boot system shares a single EFI partition. Not tried multiple Linux instances.

Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56 On Sun, May 15, 2022 at 2:58 AM William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

Can you use the same EFI partition for multiple distros?

Eg. Can you have /dev/sda1 -- /boot/efi /dev/sda2 -- Slackware / /dev/sda3 -- Ubuntu / /dev/sda4 -- Fedora / where /dev/sda1 shared?

Or, does distro need its own EFI partitions, like /dev/sda1 -- Slackware /boot/efi /dev/sda2 -- Slackware / /dev/sda3 -- Ubuntu /boot/efi /dev/sda4 -- Ubuntu / /dev/sda5 -- Fedora /boot/efi /dev/sda6 -- Fedora / ? --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

| From: William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Or, does distro need its own EFI partitions, like As others have said, you "should" have only one ESP (EFI System Partition). Here are some odd-ball other considerations. - I've heard that Windows cannot handle multiple ESPs on a disk. - I once accidentally created a second ESP on a drive. It worked but behaviour was a bit odd. When I figured it out, I deleted one (copying stuff that wasn't already on the remaining ESP) - You might decide to have an ESP on each disk of a multi-disk system. This could let you point the firmware at the disk to boot. This is generally not necessary: an ESP boot entry can point at a different disk. - Certainly a bootable USB stick would have its own ESP. - firmware setup pages are sometimes bad at configuring boot options. There is a chance that using multiple ESPs would not work with a particular firmware, or that it would actually make dual booting less awkward. Summary: a single system-wide is usually the best choice. There are odd-ball cases where more ESPs might be useful.