New BSD Installer

[Miroslav Lachman]

Mike Andrews wrote:
> On 2/14/2012 3:05 PM, Devin Teske wrote:
>> Please don't get rid of fdisk or bsdlabel as they are (and forever
>> will be)
>> required to do things like:
>>
>> 1. scripted formatting of a thumb drive
>>
>> 2. automated probing of disk information (fdisk -p)
>>
>> 3. Other tasks that are not suitably handled by curses-based utilities
>>
>> For example, the following command will create a second Windows
>> partition on a
>> thumb drive without user interaction:
>>
>> echo "p 2 0x0c * *" | fdisk -f - /dev/da0
>>
>> If you take away fdisk, how am I supposed to achieve the above?
>
> /sbin/gpart add -t 12 -i 2 da0
>
> (Untested, but that should work...)
>
> gpart is very scriptable, and still handles MBR and bsdlabel partitions
> if you need to work with removable media or volumes that will never be
> larger than 2 TB. "gpart list" and "gpart show" would get you all the
> machine-parsable stuff you'd ever need.
>
> The 2 TB limit is *the* reason to move from MBR+bsdlabel to GPT though.
> Even without RAID, 3 TB disks exist already. :) With FreeBSD's boot
> code, you don't even need an EFI-capable machine to boot from a
> GPT-partitioned device. For non-removable media, it's time to move on.
> Really. :) Even on smaller 250 GB disks, I'm using GPT just because
> there's no reason not to... it's just cleaner and it was easier to write
> gpart scripts than it was to script fdisk/bsdlabel scripts anyway.

Please don't mix two things together. gpart can replace fdisk and 
bsdlabel, but GPT vs. MBR is a different thing. GPT doesn't play nice 
with GEOM classes which store their metadata on last sector.
For example, you can't use gmirror of a whole drives and use GPT on top 
of this mirror. (and gmirror is not the only one)

Miroslav Lachman