I'm upset about FreeBSD

[Kevin Oberman]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 12:21 PM, Rostislav Krasny <rosti.bsd at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 21:57:29 +1100, Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> If FreeBSD GPT images (and Kindle readers) can trigger this, so could a
> >> theoretically unlimited combination of data on block 2 of USB media;
> >> modifying FreeBSD to fix a Windows bug should be out of the question.
> >
> > Not modifying FreeBSD and not fixing Windows bug but modifying the
> > FreeBSD installation media and working around the Windows bug to let
> > people install FreeBSD without disappointing at very beginning. Why
> > GPT is used in the memstick images at all? Why they can't be MBR
> > based? I think they can.
>
> Can't boot UEFI off of MBR disks on all BIOSes.
>
> Warner
>

I'll go one farther. You can't boot many new PCs with traditional MBR
disks. And. please don't  confuse GPT with UEFI. I have yet to find an
amd64 computer that has a problem with a GPT format with MBR. Due to broken
BIOS, my 5-year old ThinkPad won't boot UEFI, but it has no problem with
MBR, whether GPT formatted or not. As far as I know, the 11.0 memstick
images are still MBR, just on a GPT structured disk, not UEFI. (Let me know
if I am mistaken on this.)

I do accept that some early amd64 systems and, perhaps, many i386 systems
may have problems with GPT, but GPT was designed to be compatible with
traditional disk formats and, while they may have problems, they really
should work for single partition disks. And I understand that it is
frustrating if you hit one of these cases where it fails.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683