Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

On 02/23/2011 09:15, James R. Van Artsdalen wrote:
On 2/22/2011 2:57 PM, Peter Jeremy wrote:
When that does come, it will probably be driven by BIOS and hardware
vendors dropping support for MBR.
MBR is not a BIOS concept. MBR is an OS thing. The BIOS does not care
or know what kind of partitioning you use, or if you partition at all.

A GPT disk with FreeBSD should boot fine on a quarter-century-old IBM
PC/AT, until FreeBSD's "don't support 80286" message.

There may be SSDs that know about MBR - I don't know - but otherwise
hardware does not care either.

Except for the BIOSes that do know and care, you might be right. See the IBM Thinkpad bricking when you install FreeBSD on it because the BIOS doesn't like the FreeBSD partition type.

Warner

We've yet to see a "must have" technology that would require us to
shun sysinstall (as explained earlier, we have no desire whatsoever
to boot from ZFS, gmirror, geli, GPT, or anything else missing from
sysinstall).
Two vendors have released 3 TB disks and there will be more large disks
released before 9.0-RELEASE. sysinstall needs to behave well with them.

As stated, it's common to boot from ZFS, mirrors, or GPT disks. These
aren't blocker issues now.
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