I am trying to install OpenSUSE LEAP 15 from a USB. I used guided installation, as this was easiest for me to set up an encrypted LVM partition without issue. Only on OpenSUSE LEAP 15 am I now faced with installing a FAT partition - why? I selected Btrfs, vFAT was never selected, and yet this is what is automatically being selected by the installer. How do I get around this issue? Why would a FAT partition be used instead of any other Linux one? The boot-up is noticeably slower.
Nothing is clear about your problem (if there is a problem).
The UEFI specification requires that there be an EFI partition which must use FAT. If that’s the vFAT partition that troubles you, then there’s nothing much that can be done about it. Using UEFI requires it.
I’ll add that using UEFI is a big improvement over older ways to boot a typical PC.
OpenSUSE, and many other linux distros, mounts this EFI partition at “/boot/efi”. However, it is only used for booting. The normal running parts of linux are not in that partition. Perhaps having vFAT affects boot speed, but probably only by a few milliseconds. It won’t affect the normal running of your system. And that EFI partition is probably 512M in size, so tiny compared to anything else.
It ran fine, don’t get me wrong, but I thought grub2 was the boot loader to use. Is UEFI the better route to go? It is only 512 MB in size, so it is nothing. I am not too knowledgeable on boot systems, hence why I am asking. Would this be the preferable method to boot my machine?
You power on the computer.
Something has to get the software into memory to run.
Yes, grub2 (or grub2-efi) loads the kernel into memory. But, before that, something has to load grub2 into memory.
That’s where UEFI comes in. It is the firmware that is automatically loaded into memory at power-up. It then loads other software. For most linux systems, that other software is grub2-efi, which in turn loads the kernel.
UEFI is not a replacement for grub2. Rather, it is a replacement for the old BIOS that came with 1980 vintage computers and their gigantic 10M hard drives (drives said to be so big that you would never fill them). We have come a long way since then, and the old BIOS system was showing its age.
If you look in that EFI partition – look at the directory “/boot/efi/EFI/opensuse”, that’s where the files are that the UEFI firmware loads.