booting off GPT partitions

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 27 January 2010 11:45:36 am Dan Naumov wrote:
> Hey
> 
> I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT
> partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that
> I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel
> D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now
> I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I
> contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system),
> who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is
> supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current
> motherboards have support for this.
> 
> Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech misguided?

GPT was defined along with EFI, so many folks assume that you have to use EFI
to boot a GPT-labelled disk.  However, FreeBSD has its own BIOS-based 
bootstrap that can handle GPT-labelled disks.  I doubt the SuperMicro tech is 
familiar with that case.  I thought I heard that some folks had added GPT 
support to grub as well.

-- 
John Baldwin