FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[James R. Van Artsdalen]

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.

>> 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.