Check size of existing ESP partitions

[superm1]

While installing a system, generally the ESP is reused if it's already present, regardless of the size. This generally works fine when the ESP is only used for the bootloaders, but lately in the Linux world the ESP is also used for staging UEFI firmware updates by fwupd.

Windows has a tendency to make very small ESP partitions, and if the ESP is reused from Windows (for example a dual boot) then it will mean that the firmware updates will fail to work. Fwupd has a safeguard for this that it ensures that the ESP has at least 2x the SPI size before running an update (as updates usually need to make a backup copy during the process).

If there isn't enough free space when the user runs the update they'll see something like this:

/boot/efi does not have sufficient space, required 93.2 MB, got 66.8 MB

There isn't much for a user to do though at this point. They'll need to boot up a live disk and resize partitions.

So I feel that the installer should do some basic checks for this during install, and if the ESP Is too small either offer to resize it, or create a new one for use with more space. There is no reason you can't have multiple ESPs.