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From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
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Cc: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>, Ivan Voras <ivoras@fer.hr>,
	freebsd-geom@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: GPT as default?
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On Friday 20 April 2007 04:55:35 pm Maxim Sobolev wrote:
> Scott Long wrote:
> > Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> >> In message <f0am4t$mmk$1@sea.gmane.org>, Ivan Voras writes:
> >>
> >>> Currently, the FreeBSD default is classic BSD partitions on top of 
> >>> MSDOS partitions, and there are a couple of inconvenient things about 
> >>> this arrangement:
> >>
> >> The BSD partitioning should be discontinued as fast and firmly
> >> as possible.  By all means go GPT.
> >>
> > 
> > An i386/amd64 bootloader needs to be written that can understand GPT.
> > My understanding is that the ia64 EFI/GPT loader has very few reusable
> > bits.
> 
> It probably crazy idea, but I wonder if it's feasible to have 
> "mini-GEOM" layer in loader, so that it's possible to use existing GEOM 
> classes codebase there with little or no modifications.

The loader is the easy part.  boot1/2 is the hard one. :(  You need both an 
EFI loader, and a non-EFI bootstrap to load a non-EFI loader that can grok 
GPT for the non-EFI case where we still want to use GPT.

-- 
John Baldwin