You are laying out the disk for a workstation that boots via UEFI. Which filesystem must be created on the EFI System Partition so that the firmware itself can read the boot loader from it?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 102. Linux installation and package management medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct FAT32, created with mkfs.vfat -F 32
Correct. The UEFI specification requires firmware to implement a FAT driver, so the ESP carries a FAT filesystem; FAT32 is the usual choice on fixed disks.
Not correct ext4, created with mkfs.ext4
Wrong. ext4 is a Linux filesystem and no firmware is required to understand it, so the firmware could not read the loader before the kernel is running.
Not correct XFS, created with mkfs.xfs
Wrong. XFS is a general-purpose Linux filesystem; like ext4 it is invisible to UEFI firmware.
Not correct swap, created with mkswap
Wrong. A swap area holds no files at all and is used by the kernel for paging, not by the firmware for booting.
Why
The ESP is an ordinary GPT partition with the EFI System partition type GUID, formatted FAT and holding EFI applications under /EFI/<vendor>/. Firmware is only obliged to understand FAT, which is why the partition type and the filesystem type are both fixed by the specification. On Linux it is conventionally mounted at /boot/efi (some distributions use /efi), and the kernel and initramfs may still live on a separate Linux filesystem at /boot.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page bootctl(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 102 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- A mail server keeps filling its root filesystem because spooled mail and logs grow without bound, and when the disk fills the whole system becomes unusable. Which single change to the disk layout most directly contains that failure? machine-checked
- In LVM terminology, which object is created directly on a partition or whole disk so that its storage can be added to a pool? machine-checked
- You are laying out storage for a general-purpose Linux server. Which TWO of the following are genuine reasons to use LVM for the data filesystems rather than plain partitions? machine-checked
- Which file is the configuration file that GRUB 2 generates, and which administrators are told not to edit by hand on a typical Linux distribution? machine-checked
- You replaced the boot disk in a BIOS/MBR system and need to write the GRUB 2 boot loader into the master boot record of /dev/sda, installing the required GRUB modules under /boot. Which command does that? machine-checked
- On a GRUB 2 system whose configuration file is /boot/grub/grub.cfg, type the grub-mkconfig command — including the option and its argument — that regenerates that file. machine-checked