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Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:19:03 +0200
From: Andriy Gapon <avg@icyb.net.ua>
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To: Robert Noland <rnoland@FreeBSD.org>
References: <cf9b1ee01001211957j43a9d6a9j3d1e29d19aebf418@mail.gmail.com>	<20100122041237.GA22312@gothschlampen.com>	<cf9b1ee01001212049u6cffd8abo9efa380a8efa9609@mail.gmail.com>	<cf9b1ee01001212102r70b88806m21b167a2aa833362@mail.gmail.com>	<20100124092947.B72039@starfire.mn.org>	<cf9b1ee01001240759j2476cf3es2babd8b32a90f9aa@mail.gmail.com>	<201001242057.o0OKvHUE089237@drugs.dv.isc.org>
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Cc: FreeBSD-STABLE Mailing List <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.org>,
	freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org>
Subject: Re: Loader, MBR and the boot process
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on 25/01/2010 04:41 Robert Noland said the following:
> On Mon, 2010-01-25 at 07:57 +1100, Mark Andrews wrote:
>>      offset  The offset of the start of the partition from the beginning of
>>              the drive in sectors, or * to have bsdlabel calculate the correct
>>              offset to use (the end of the previous partition plus one, ignor-
>>              ing partition `c'.  For partition `c', * will be interpreted as
>>              an offset of 0.  The first partition should start at offset 16,
>>              because the first 16 sectors are reserved for metadata.
> 
> Ok, now this has my attention... My gut feeling right now is that this
> is a bug in geom_part_bsd.  I don't understand why the label isn't
> protected.  (Adding -b 16 when adding the swap partition fixes this)
> Another project to goes on my list...
> 
> If anyone knows why this is done like this... please share.

I presume that this is for purely historic reasons.

-- 
Andriy Gapon