Increase size of Limine boot partition if snapper snapshots are enabled

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
55/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
arch-linux, linux, python

Research direction

Start by tracing the archinstall best-effort partitioning flow for Limine when Btrfs and snapper snapshots are enabled. Compare the current boot-partition default with the linked limine-snapper-sync requirements and clarify the target size; done means the relevant configuration can accommodate the stated snapshot and kernel space without manual partitioning.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

describe the request

limine-snapper-sync is a tool used for allowing booting from btrfs snapshots within the limine bootloader that I would highly recommend anyone who has limine+btrfs w. snapper to use. The project recommends 4GB for the boot partition but personally I havent needed to go above 2GB. When using the archinstall script i need to manually set up the disk partitioning configuration as the default "best-effort" option does not allow changing from the default 1GB.

https://gitlab.com/Zesko/limine-snapper-sync/#requirements

A FAT32 boot partition of at least 4 GiB is recommended, depending on how many snapshots and kernel versions you keep.
Note: NVIDIA drivers and DKMS modules can use over 300 MiB per kernel version. Your boot partition should be large enough for future kernels and snapshots without resizing.

Caveats:

  1. With 2 kernels (linux and linux-lts), a few months worth of snapshots with the automated cleanups, and no DKMS modules, my usage has plateaued at ~1.2GB so all the way to 4 may not be needed for a lot of users.
  2. reports of running out of space seem to be mostly CachyOS and not vanilla arch (https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/boot-partition-usage-limit-is-exceeded/21452, https://www.reddit.com/r/cachyos/comments/1pmt9mo/how_should_i_increase_boot_partition_size_esp_too/)

Limine-snapper-sync is not in the main arch repos, if it were I would also recommend adding it to the default archinstall configuration if limine is selected and snapper snapshots enabled but this is not the case unfortunately. This may affect the strength of my argument but would be disingenuous to not bring up

Dominant language
Python
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Merged PRs (30d)
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