Comment # 4 on bug 1084717 from Ancor Gonzalez Sosa

(In reply to Jan Engelhardt from comment #3)
> So why is the recommendation 256 MB? Is this a recommendation from a
> different vendor which SUSE chose to pick up, and if so, who was that vendor?
> 
> It's not like SUSE puts kernels onto the ESP, so that space seems wasted, at
> present.

First of all, you only have one shot to create a big-enough ESP (/boot/efi)
partition to be shared by all the operating systems living in the same disk. So
YaST prefer to "waste" a couple of hundreds of megabytes rather than annoying
users with a bigger problem in the future when they want to install Ubuntu or
Windows alongside the openSUSE system and it's already too late to fix the
issue in an easy way.

That being said, note that for Advanced Format 4K Native drives
(4-KiB-per-sector) drives, the size must be at least 256 MiB because that's the
minimum partition size of FAT32 drives (calculated as sector size (4KiB) x
65527 = 256 MiB), due to a limitation of the FAT32 file format. Those drives
are common enough (more over time) to take them into consideration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format

So if we have to choose between wasting 200 MiB (in 2018*) on one hand or
causing problems to users with Advanced Format drives and/or to users wanting
to install many operating systems on the other hand, he election is clear to
YaST.


[*] Really, 15 years ago in Europe it was already almost impossible to buy a
disk smaller than 10GiB.