The RPi user doesn't actually have to know or think about what kind of filesystem is on the SD card. There are images that you just download and write to the card, plug the card into the Pi and boot. What the filesystem ends up as is not something the user has to think about. It's actually unlikely that it's FAT.. that's not an efficient system for Linux. But, you see, even though I have done that procedure for several Pi3 boards, I'm not actually sure! Because I never had to format anything, the download&write doesn't care what's on the card already, it'll be overwritten.
The SoC on the Raspberry Pi has a video processor (GPU) that is actually the first thing to run at power up. That video core only understands FAT and can boot from a FAT partition on SD card (Or elsewhere I think now a days).
For those using Raspbian OS on the Raspberry Pi the SD contains a small FAT partition and the rest is ext4 format. The video core reads the Linux kernel image from that FAT partition into memory and the fires up the ARM processor to run it. Linux of course uses the ext4 partition for it's root file system. As Tor says, no one need know any of this to get started, just write the Raspbian image to SD and away you go.
Then the there is the NOOBS thing. Which I have never used. In NOOBS the whole SD is initially FAT format. The user just copies NOOBS to there (file copy not image writing). On start up NOOBS runs and allows installation of the actual Linux, or other, operating system.
The SoC on the Raspberry Pi has a video processor (GPU) that is actually the first thing to run at power up. That video core only understands FAT and can boot from a FAT partition on SD card (Or elsewhere I think now a days).
For those using Raspbian OS on the Raspberry Pi the SD contains a small FAT partition and the rest is ext4 format. The video core reads the Linux kernel image from that FAT partition into memory and the fires up the ARM processor to run it. Linux of course uses the ext4 partition for it's root file system. As Tor says, no one need know any of this to get started, just write the Raspbian image to SD and away you go.
Then the there is the NOOBS thing. Which I have never used. In NOOBS the whole SD is initially FAT format. The user just copies NOOBS to there (file copy not image writing). On start up NOOBS runs and allows installation of the actual Linux, or other, operating system.
That's a simple, flexible, and clean way way to go with the P2 as well. Not necessarily FAT as the boot partition although that is not a bad choice, but an image with a standard type of boot partition followed by partitions of whatever type the application needs.
Comments
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/sdxc_formatting.md
That is probably the way to go...
For those using Raspbian OS on the Raspberry Pi the SD contains a small FAT partition and the rest is ext4 format. The video core reads the Linux kernel image from that FAT partition into memory and the fires up the ARM processor to run it. Linux of course uses the ext4 partition for it's root file system. As Tor says, no one need know any of this to get started, just write the Raspbian image to SD and away you go.
Then the there is the NOOBS thing. Which I have never used. In NOOBS the whole SD is initially FAT format. The user just copies NOOBS to there (file copy not image writing). On start up NOOBS runs and allows installation of the actual Linux, or other, operating system.
That's a simple, flexible, and clean way way to go with the P2 as well. Not necessarily FAT as the boot partition although that is not a bad choice, but an image with a standard type of boot partition followed by partitions of whatever type the application needs.