FreeBSD-ppc on an external hdd (Mac Mini)

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 1:18 PM +1000 7/2/05, Peter Grehan wrote:
>  > At this point with FreeBSD/PPC 6.0-RELEASE happening we
>  > can't stick our heads in the sand anymore.  What type of
>  > labels do we support and which non-Sysinstall programs
>  > does one use when adding a 2nd disk to their system?
>
>Sysinstall for FreeBSD/PPC only understands APM partitions,
>though you should be able to manually create GPT partitions.
>
>My (unrealised) plan for APM partition editing was to pull
>in pdisk.

One of the reasons to create partitions is to split up a huge
disk so it can be used by different operating systems.  In my
case, I'd like to set up my Mac-mini so it could boot up MacOS,
FreeBSD, or OpenBSD.  For that I pretty much need FreeBSD to
support APM-style partitions, because the other OS's aren't
going to support alternate partitioning schemes.

I haven't had the time to try an OpenBSD install yet, but it
looks like it takes a single large APM-style partition, and
then it knows how to split that up for the separate partitions
that it might want.

Could we do that with GPT-style partitions, instead of a single
APM-stype partition?  For PPC on Apple hardware, we already need
to have the boot-loader to be sitting on a HFS+ partition (since
open-firmware can not read our partition formats).  What is the
issue with using GPT-style partitions for boot-disks?  Is it in
finding the boot-loader, or is it the boot-loader itself which
has no support for GPT?  Would there be less of an issue on PPC
since file for the boot-loader itself would not need to be on a
GPT-style partition?

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu