Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:33:10 -0500 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org, Devin Teske <dteske@vicor.com>, "James R. Van Artsdalen" <james-freebsd-current@jrv.org>, Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy@acm.org>, freebsd-sysinstall@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap Message-ID: <201102231133.10571.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <4D65328D.3050709@jrv.org> References: <4D35CFFB.3010302@freebsd.org> <20110222205741.GA34103@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org> <4D65328D.3050709@jrv.org>
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On Wednesday, February 23, 2011 11:15:09 am James R. Van Artsdalen wrote: > On 2/22/2011 2:57 PM, Peter Jeremy wrote: > > When that does come, it will probably be driven by BIOS and hardware > > vendors dropping support for MBR. > > MBR is not a BIOS concept. MBR is an OS thing. The BIOS does not care > or know what kind of partitioning you use, or if you partition at all. That is mostly true. There are some SCSI BIOSes that would examine the MBR and infer what C/H/S geometry the OS was expecting from the MBR. The original dedicated disk dummy MBR triggered a divide by zero in one of these BIOS ROMs. > A GPT disk with FreeBSD should boot fine on a quarter-century-old IBM > PC/AT, until FreeBSD's "don't support 80286" message. Even a GPT has a legacy MBR (the PMBR) at the front of the disk (it marks the entire disk as in use by a special 0xee partition or some such). -- John Baldwin
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