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Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:16:03 -0600
From: Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org>
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Cc: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org,
	Ivan Voras <ivoras@fer.hr>, freebsd-geom@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: GPT as default?
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John Baldwin wrote:
> On Friday 20 April 2007 04:55:35 pm Maxim Sobolev wrote:
>> Scott Long wrote:
>>> Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>>>> In message <f0am4t$mmk$1@sea.gmane.org>, Ivan Voras writes:
>>>>
>>>>> Currently, the FreeBSD default is classic BSD partitions on top of 
>>>>> MSDOS partitions, and there are a couple of inconvenient things about 
>>>>> this arrangement:
>>>> The BSD partitioning should be discontinued as fast and firmly
>>>> as possible.  By all means go GPT.
>>>>
>>> An i386/amd64 bootloader needs to be written that can understand GPT.
>>> My understanding is that the ia64 EFI/GPT loader has very few reusable
>>> bits.
>> It probably crazy idea, but I wonder if it's feasible to have 
>> "mini-GEOM" layer in loader, so that it's possible to use existing GEOM 
>> classes codebase there with little or no modifications.
> 
> The loader is the easy part.  boot1/2 is the hard one. :(  You need both an 
> EFI loader, and a non-EFI bootstrap to load a non-EFI loader that can grok 
> GPT for the non-EFI case where we still want to use GPT.
> 

Are there real-world PC BIOS's that understand GPT but aren't EFI-based?

Scott