Re: Is it time to dump disklabel and use GPT instead?

[Matthew Dillon]

:
:DragonFly could really lead the way here amongst the BSDs who all use some
:version of disklabel. Can DF boot from a GPT partition? If so the next
:thing would be teaching it to boot from such a partition without a
:disklabel present.
:
:For example:
:/boot ... /dev/da0p0
:/ ... /dev/da0p1
:/usr ... /dev/da0p2
:/var ... /dev/da0p3
:
:and so-on.
:
:Its simple and elegant and will not confuse everyone who is new the BSDs.
:
:Petr

Well, there are two parts to GPT.  There is the partition table
standard and then there is the BIOS support.  If you mean booting
from a GPT compatibility slice without needing the BIOS support
then it is probably doable.  If you mean using the BIOS support API
then it gets a lot more difficult.

However, our 64-bit disklabel tool is far more advanced then our
gpt tool.  It has uuids, a 64-bit address space, super-sector alignment,
and no slice limit (though the kernel itself implements some practical
limits).  FreeBSD has a new gpt suite but I have no idea if their
partitioning tool was made more convenient (as in throws you into
vi and lets you loose).

Going to GPT is more a matter of wanting to support multi-boot.  I
personally have never been keen on multi-boot setups, I don't see much
of a point to it other than for playing around.  But if someone wants
to do the work and can also fix GPT to properly super-sector align
partitions then go for it!

-Matt
Matthew Dillon 
dil...@backplane.com

Re: Is it time to dump disklabel and use GPT instead?

[elekktretterr]

 Well, there are two parts to GPT.  There is the partition table
 standard and then there is the BIOS support.  If you mean booting
 from a GPT compatibility slice without needing the BIOS support
 then it is probably doable.

This.

I've come across a few people (Linux users wanting to try DragonFly
because of HAMMER) who ultimately go somewhere else because of difficulty
to setup partitions(both fdisk and disklabel are difficult to use).

Another reason being we don't have BASH in the base which Linux users like.
They do get turned off with TCSH, I dont mind it but Im not a Linux user.

To setup a HAMMER filesystem requires at least 4 steps: 1) fdisk 2)
disklabel 3) newfs_hammer 4) Create PFSs

Disklabel seems to be largely redundant to GPT just for the sake of
BSDism. Im not in favour of making things more user-friendly just for the
sake of it, but this also seems to be a logical step forward.

Petr