BIOS boot partition: Difference between revisions

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Overview: find the alignment spec text
Overview: full quote
 
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}}</ref> (which, when written to a GPT in the required little endian fields, forms the ASCII string "<code>Hah!IdontNeedEFI</code>").<!-- See talk page for some notes on endianness confusion. --> In the context of GPT on a BIOS-based computer, a BIOS boot partition is similar in some respects to the [[EFI system partition]], which is used by systems based on [[Extensible Firmware Interface|EFI]]. The EFI System partition holds a filesystem and files used by the UEFI, while the BIOS boot partition is used in BIOS-based systems and accessed without a filesystem by holding raw binary code.
 
The size requirements for a BIOS boot partition are quite low so it can be as small as about 30&nbsp;KiB; however, as future boot loaders might require more space, 1&nbsp;MiB might be a reasonable BIOS boot partition size. Due to the [[1 MB partition alignment|1&nbsp;MiB partition alignment]] policies used by most modern disk partitioning tools to provide optimum performance with [[Advanced Format]] disks, [[Solid-state drive|SSD devices]] and certain [[RAID]] configurations, some room is left allowing the placement of a BIOS boot partition between the GPT and the first partition aligned that way (34&ndash;20482047 for 512-byte sectors; 6&ndash;255 for 4096-byte sectors). If created by utilizing that free space, the BIOS boot partition would be out of the GPT alignment specification,<ref>See https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.10/05_GUID_Partition_Table_Format.html, text"GPT startingpartitions withshould be aligned to the larger of: "GPT partitions should be aligned to the larger of": a – The physical block boundary, if any; b – The optimal transfer length granularity, if any."</ref> but that is not very important since: (a) the alignment rule is "should" and not "must" (b) the rule is based on a performance consideration, which for a very small partition used only at system boot bears no real consequence.
 
== Creation ==