Hi! I think I might be getting boring with pushing this idea so I intend this to be my last broadcast about it. The idea is: to replace old "MSDOS fdisk"+"BSD labels" partitioning scheme with GPT partitions. The old scheme is a not-really-clean hack and the major issue with it is that it can't support partitions larger than 2 TB (and also storage devices larger than 2 TB). The 7.0 release is ideal for this, since it will deliver many nice things, such as ZFS, gjournal, and also, among others, a new installer (http://wiki.freebsd.org/finstall - hence my interest in this). The support for GPT is incomplete: the major thing missing is the capability to boot from GPT-partitioned system (assuming there's no EFI firmware - meaning we're interested in plain x86/amd64 systems). Almost all of the boot loader chain (mbr, boot0, boot1, loader) will have to be modified, but not all of it extensively. One solution would be to have separate chains for fdisk+bsdlabels and GPT booting. Implementing all this on non-EFI systems might require violating the EFI/GPT spec a little. Another thing that would be nice to have is support for fdisk and disklabel partitions inside geom_part, so it's management utility can be used for both GPT and old style partition management (instead of currently used two tools: fdisk and disklabel). Since 7.x will be branched soon-ish, this modifications will have to be done soon, or the 7.x branch will continue to use old style partitions. While the consensus is that GPT and GEOM_PART are very nice and desirable instead of the current scheme (which is really obsolete now and will soon become useless on even medium-sized machines), AFAIK nobody's offered to do it, and this is a sort of call for volunteers. There's more info in the hackers_at_ archives, and for those interested, general description of GPT can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/bdeda920-1f08-4683-9ffb-7b4b50df0b5a1033.mspx?mfr=true The actual specification of GPT is a part of the EFI specification (http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/).
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