EFI System Partition

The EFI system partition (ESP) is Article description::a [[FAT formatted partition containing the primary EFI boot loader(s) or kernel image(s) for installed operating systems.]]

Kernel
Advanced partition selection ( CONFIG_PARTITION_ADVANCED ) and EFI GUID Partition support ( CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION ) must be enabled:

ISO8859-1 codepage must be enabled too, in order to mount the EFI partition:

Kernels running from the ESP will require EFI Framebuffer support.

Characteristics
For creation instructions see Handbook

will show it with the boot, esp flags:

will show it with partition code EF00:

Its filesystem can be created using the mkfs.fat command:

Size considerations
100 MiB should be enough for some primary bootloader payloads such as EFI stub kernels or boot loaders such as GRUB 2 or Windows. This forums post however suggests giving it more space if a distribution kernel is used.

Mount point
An entry in Handbook:AMD64/Installation/System is not needed for booting but might be useful for manually mounting the ESP.

Standard layout
There is a standard layout for the ESP. Vendors and distributions are supposed to put their stuff into vendor specific directories.

Here the Microsoft subtree - and also the Boot subtree - was created by an earlier installation of Windows 10 Creators Update. The Boot subtree is the fallback directory. If UEFI can't find any vendor specific directories it will boot from here. In a multiboot environment with properly set up vendor specific subtrees the Boot subtree can be deleted.

UEFI boot items
Computers with UEFI usually provide a boot menu and a configuration tool for creating, sorting or deleting boot items. The content of the ESP is visible to these tools and creating a boot item is like choosing the medium from a given selection, then surfing through the ESP and selecting the item, e.g bzImage-4.9.76-r1-gentoo.efi.

Alternatively, efibootmgr can be used for generating the UEFI boot items.

External resources

 * EFI System Partition on Arch wiki
 * The EFI System Partition and the Default Boot Behavior