Subject: Re: GPT support still needed? (was: RE: Recursive partitioning)
To: De Zeurkous <zeurkous@nichten.info>
From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@shagadelic.org>
List: tech-kern
Date: 06/06/2007 11:02:57
On Jun 6, 2007, at 10:37 AM, De Zeurkous wrote:
> 1) It includes features which are not necessary (GUIDs for example);
Maybe not necessary in your limited world, but they're quite useful in
the real world.
> 2) It's practically a superset of MBR (calling it 'protective' doesn't
> change that fact);
You're still confused as to what that MBR is actually there for. I
can't fix that; you just need to educate yourself.
> 3) It deals with a load of IBM PC-specific (mostly Windoze, even)
> stuff;
Can you please be specific?
> 4) Worse, it deals with some stuff that is likely to change (fixed
> checksum format, little-endianness, other constants which should be
> copy-on-write)
Why do you think these things are "likely to change"?
> 5) Doesn't seem to have non-specific metadata fields, even optional.
Oh really? Please explain specifically what you'd like to see, and
then maybe I can show you how to do it with GPT. I happen to have a
fair amount of experience using GPT in interesting ways.
> 6) M$ and Intel seem to have pushed it, which most likely means the
> current format is gone faster than it takes to be actually
> standardized.
Uh... so that automatically makes it evil? A de facto standard that
provides basically everything that we need is certainly better than
none at all, and adopting a de facto standard has advantages to
rolling one's own.
> Those should be standardized to network byte order in the new
> disklabel
> format.
Any reason other than religion?
> Still, why not remove the impact of the collision entirely?
As engineers, we weigh effort vs. benefit. For the amount of effort,
I don't see a lot of additional benefit over GUIDs.
> Footnote or not, when M$ and Intel are involved you can be /sure/
> that it
> will be come practically required soon enough.
Quite a mind reader you are.
> The Windoze-specificness and legacy support built into GPT, and, as
> a side
> note, the fact that I prefer Sun workstations running NetBSD over
> IBM PCs.
What Windows-specific stuff are you talking about? Legacy? You mean
the protective MBR? Whatever.
-- thorpej