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Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2013 19:43:28 -0500
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To: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de>
Subject: Re: bsdinstall misaligns partitions
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Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> Shouldn't bsdinstall attempt to align partitions on 4k boundaries
> both for the benefit of 4k drives and flash storage?
> 
> I just installed 9.1R i386 for fun and practice, in fact I installed
> it several times, and I played around with the partitioning options.
> 
> * The modern GPT scheme reserves 34 sectors at the start of the disk.
>   Your newly created partitions will start at offset 34 and will
>   therefor be misaligned.  I ended up configuring a 63 kB freebsd-boot
>   partition, which ensures that the following partitions are aligned.
> 
> * The old MBR scheme is even worse.  The FreeBSD slice will start
>   at sector 63, guaranteeing that any partitions contained within
>   will be misaligned.  There is no way to fix this, unless you
>   shell out and run fdisk manually.
> 
> * Funnily enough, the ancient BSD "dangerously dedicated" scheme
>   is the only one that out of the box does not misalign partitions.
> 
> I'm presumably not the first one to notice this issue, and yes, I'm
> mostly just venting.
> 

Best advice is go submit a pr on this bsdinstall situation.