On Jun 6, 2007, at 12:01 AM, De Zeurkous wrote:

> Haai,
>
> On Tue, June 5, 2007 23:05, Jason Thorpe wrote:
>>
>>> [snip]
>>
>
>> BSD Disklabels just plain stink.
>
> We seem to have a slight difference of opinion. Personally, I  
> believe BSD
> disklabels to be a pretty clean and elegant design.

Well, sure, 20 years ago they were an improvement over what had  
existed previously (which is to say -- "nothing" ... did you ever use  
4.3BSD on an hp300 and suffer through the hard-coded partition scheme  
in the disk drivers?)

But by today's standards, they stink.  They're not extensible, contain  
too much useless data in them that has no meaning on modern disks,  
have limited data ranges that they can describe, and have no standard  
layout even within NetBSD.


> GPT is more like MBR
> Service Pack 1...

On the contrary.  GPT is an extensible partition map format that  
supports extremely large disks and an arbitrary number of partitions  
without requiring nesting or other nasty gunk.  And due to its use of  
GUIDs, it can uniquely identify both file systems as they move from  
one machine to another (for e.g. hot-plug external disks) as well as  
uniquely identify file system formats without risk of numbering  
collision.

> ...please, let's just let MBR die as nature intended :)

The EFI standard that describes GPT includes a provision for a  
"protective MBR" that is essentially there for backward compatibility  
with non-GPT aware systems.  Its intended usage is to mark the entire  
disk as "reserved -- don't futz with it!".  The fact that it can be  
used in other clever ways is a useful side-effect in some situations,  
but is orthogonal to GPT's usefulness on its own.

-- thorpej