The EFI partition is a required partition used by the UEFI partition schemes.
GuixSD does not require anything special compared to other distributions.
I recommend you have a look at
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Partitioning
for general guidelines. Then you choose how to partition your drives as you
wish. Using the UEFI partition scheme, you can have two partitions:
- EFI
- root
You are free to add as many partitions as you want.
"Free space" is wasted space, make sure that your partition scheme covers the
whole drive.
--
Pierre Neidhardt
the reason why I was confused by the partitions I saw is because I was using the wrong image
This one
The right image is this one
With the right image , I only saw a large blob of free space