Loader, MBR and the boot process

[Andriy Gapon]

on 25/01/2010 04:41 Robert Noland said the following:
> On Mon, 2010-01-25 at 07:57 +1100, Mark Andrews wrote:
>>      offset  The offset of the start of the partition from the beginning of
>>              the drive in sectors, or * to have bsdlabel calculate the correct
>>              offset to use (the end of the previous partition plus one, ignor-
>>              ing partition `c'.  For partition `c', * will be interpreted as
>>              an offset of 0.  The first partition should start at offset 16,
>>              because the first 16 sectors are reserved for metadata.
> 
> Ok, now this has my attention... My gut feeling right now is that this
> is a bug in geom_part_bsd.  I don't understand why the label isn't
> protected.  (Adding -b 16 when adding the swap partition fixes this)
> Another project to goes on my list...
> 
> If anyone knows why this is done like this... please share.

I presume that this is for purely historic reasons.

-- 
Andriy Gapon