Fedora 43 is working its way toward release in the coming weeks and is now going through a very late change. A change was announced and accepted today for increasing the size of the /boot partition. This is driven by the ever-increasing number of firmware files needed for different devices to function under Linux with open-source drivers. A large motivator to this change was the very large and growing NVIDIA GPU firmware file sizes for Nouveau and the future Nova driver.
The “emergency” change proposal was filed and accepted for increasing the default /boot partition size from 1G to 2G for Fedora 43. This change was done late when realizing the limits are approaching with firmware files continuing to get bigger and in turn the initramfs too while the 1G /boot default on Fedora hasn’t been changed in the better part of a decade. The hope in moving to 2G is that it will be able to handle upgrades to Fedora Linux over the next five years.
This Fedora Wiki page explains the late change to Fedora 43 that will now happen ahead of the official release.
There is more Linux firmware files present as new hardware continues to be enabled under Linux. GPU firmware files are among the biggest drivers with the NVIDIA GPU firmware files increasing to around 100MB this summer. The NVIDIA GA102 GSP firmware compressed alone is approaching 49MB. So for Fedora Workstation and other desktop uses where Fedora needs to be ready for the possibility of open-source NVIDIA driver support, it’s eating into the /boot size. Firmware on ARM64 systems with the likes of Snapdragon X Elite laptops and more also continues to grow.
So long story short, Fedora 43 will be making the default /boot partition to 2G rather than 1G to handle this firmware influx.
