FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[Warner Losh]

On 02/23/2011 09:15, 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.
>
> A GPT disk with FreeBSD  should boot fine on a quarter-century-old IBM
> PC/AT, until FreeBSD's "don't support 80286" message.
>
> There may be SSDs that know about MBR - I don't know - but otherwise
> hardware does not care either.

Except for the BIOSes that do know and care, you might be right.  See 
the IBM Thinkpad bricking when you install FreeBSD on it because the 
BIOS doesn't like the FreeBSD partition type.

Warner

>>> We've yet to see a "must have" technology that would require us to
>>> shun sysinstall (as explained earlier, we have no desire whatsoever
>>> to boot from ZFS, gmirror, geli, GPT, or anything else missing from
>>> sysinstall).
> Two vendors have released 3 TB disks and there will be more large disks
> released before 9.0-RELEASE.  sysinstall needs to behave well with them.
>
> As stated, it's common to boot from ZFS, mirrors, or GPT disks.  These
> aren't blocker issues now.
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