Request for comments, new geom part type alias: freebsd-geom

[David Cross]

Because I apparently I suck at mailing lists. Sorry for the dupe messages coming :(

I am not picky about the name; I picked -geom since it seemed to be part of the geom system (yes.. I know 'everything' is part of the geom system in that sense); but geom-labeled? Not sure what else to call it.  'misc' seems overly broad, there's a very specific but common (I think) use case where people have gmirrors, gstripes, geli, gconcat, etc...) they are using

> On Jul 29, 2018, at 17:01, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> Why '-geom'? Why not 'freebsd-misc'?
> 
> And what, exactly, do you mean by 'create a GPT partition'?
> 
> Warner
> 
>> On Sun, Jul 29, 2018 at 2:49 PM, David Cross <dcrosstech at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'd like to propose that we create a GPT partition for geom labeled
>> partitions (gmirror, gstripe, geli, etc.. anything that can be 'tasted' and
>> automatically determined.) called 'freebsd-geom'.
>> 
>> There are numerous cases where you shouldn't have a raw geom on a disk (for
>> example, imagine a raid 10 of a filesystem with VMs on it..on a raw disk
>> its possible that the lead block happens to line up with a VM disk image or
>> anything else a BIOS may determine is bootable).
>> 
>> So the question becomes which part id to use; IF its a mirror of a swap of
>> UFS it seems perfectly reasonable to use freebsd-swap or freebsd-ufs (if a
>> bit dangerous).  If its a mirror or a geli then you can again be in the
>> situation where the boot blocks (or something else), in certain
>> circumstances mistakes these for raw filesystems with similarly calamitous
>> results.
>> 
>> Given these, it seems a 'freebsd-geom' (or similar) seems entirely
>> appropriate; we can mark these for what they really are, and eliminate
>> these cases where the system misinterprets intentions based on ambiguous
>> data.
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>