Re: Is it time to dump disklabel and use GPT instead?

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

:
:DragonFly could really lead the way here amongst the BSDs who all use some
:version of disklabel. Can DF boot from a GPT partition? If so the next
:thing would be teaching it to boot from such a partition without a
:disklabel present.
:
:For example:
:/boot ... /dev/da0p0
:/ ... /dev/da0p1
:/usr ... /dev/da0p2
:/var ... /dev/da0p3
:
:and so-on.
:
:Its simple and elegant and will not confuse everyone who is new the BSDs.
:
:Petr

    Well, there are two parts to GPT.  There is the partition table
    standard and then there is the BIOS support.  If you mean booting
    from a GPT compatibility slice without needing the BIOS support
    then it is probably doable.  If you mean using the BIOS support API
    then it gets a lot more difficult.

    However, our 64-bit disklabel tool is far more advanced then our
    gpt tool.  It has uuids, a 64-bit address space, super-sector alignment,
    and no slice limit (though the kernel itself implements some practical
    limits).  FreeBSD has a new gpt suite but I have no idea if their
    partitioning tool was made more convenient (as in throws you into
    vi and lets you loose).

    Going to GPT is more a matter of wanting to support multi-boot.  I
    personally have never been keen on multi-boot setups, I don't see much
    of a point to it other than for playing around.  But if someone wants
    to do the work and can also fix GPT to properly super-sector align
    partitions then go for it!

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@backplane.com>