Default support for GPT [was: Re: More than 8 labels per slice]

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Scott Long wrote:

> > If there are no objections I'll enable it on i386 and amd64 over the
> > weekend or so. If people feel we should enable the support on alpha
> > and sparc64 as well, holler.
> 
> I remember there being rumors a year or two ago about Intel trying to
> sack legacy BIOS and MBR support on x86 entirely and force everyone to
> use EFI and GPT.  Without GPT support in the system bootstrap, it's not
> terribly interesting to use except on secondary storage. 

The GPT partition table includes an fdisk compatibility partition table in
it to describe the first partition (and reserve the rest?).  That way you
can boot from an older BIOS even if you lay down GPT over the entire boot
disk, or at least I believe that was the intent.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research