FAT is only patented if you want long filenames. If 8~3 filenames are long enough (and for EFI boot they are) then you can use FAT32 with short names. Addition

FAT is only patented if you want long filenames. If 8~3 filenames are long enough (and for EFI boot they are) then you can use FAT32 with short names. Additionally the specific EFI FAT32 implementation grants various patent rights which means you can implement EFI FAT32 (atleast, last time I checked by the situation) The other restrictions of the FS barely matter since 99.9% of the time it's used as /boot it will be read from and has barely any activity. The data integrity can be insured by setting up secureboot (MS or User/Setup mode) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Patents