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ESP

ESP stands for EFI system partition.

The ESP is a partition with a FAT file system (FAT12, FAT16 or FAT32, FAT32 is recommended). One ESP must be present in all GPT formatted disks.

Usually, the ESP is around 200-250 MB and resides on a disk's first partition (e.g. /dev/sda1).

The partition code of an ESP is EF02 (gdisk).

parted shows such a partition with the /boot flag. (Note: in a MBR partitioned harddisk, the boot flag has a different meaning).

https://wiki.archlinux.de/title/UEFI_Installation claims that the minimum size of the EFI partition is 512 MiB because FAT32 requires at least that much.

The ESP contains the boot loader for all installed operating systems, the device drivers and system programs that run before the operating system is started.

This is one of the big advantages of UEFI over BIOS: Every operating system can install the files it needs into the ESP.

ESP

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