FreeBSD 9.0-BETA2 memstick USB image hangs my BIOS

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 09/27/11 08:24, Matt Thyer wrote:
> On Sep 26, 2011 2:33 PM, "Adrian Chadd"<adrian at freebsd.org>  wrote:
>>
>> On 26 September 2011 12:56, Kevin Oberman<kob6558 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> I suspect that the thumb  drive is the issue, not FreeBSD.
>>
>> I've booted the drive successfully on an older Via C3 board.
>>
>> I'm now watching it boot successfully on a Gigabyte GA-8I915PC Duo board.
>>
>> I'm going to try dumping a Linux distro on this USB disk after I get
>> PCBSD 9.0-BETA2 installed. That way I can try to eliminate the USB
>> disk as being "funny".
>> (Although it's quite possible the USB disk is doing other funny things.)
>>
>> I really do think that this BIOS of mine dislikes a GPT partition
>> inside an MBR/DOS setup. If this is the case, I wonder how many other
>> motherboard/BIOSes have this problem.
>>
>>
>>
>> Adrian
>
> I believe this would be due to the improper GPT partition table on the
> FreeBSD memstick (as there is no backup partition table at the end of the
> volume).
>
> This was discussed earlier and now that makefs has patches for UFS label
> support there should be no need to continue to use GPT partitioning for the
> memstick image.
>
> The background is that bsdinstall relys on labels (a good thing) and GPT
> partition labels were being used but as there's no way to predict the size
> of your memstick, the resulting GPT partition table was not valid (for
> strict UEFI systems).
>
> The fix was to go back to traditional MS-DOS partitioning (MBR) but this
> couldn't be done until makefs supported UFS labels. Someone came up with
> patches so 9.0 should be able to have an MBR memstick and bsdinstall.
>
> I'm not sure how far this has progressed.

I don't believe these patches were ever committed. Could you provide a 
pointer to them?
-Nathan