From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S271177AbTGPWwR (ORCPT ); Wed, 16 Jul 2003 18:52:17 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S271195AbTGPWuk (ORCPT ); Wed, 16 Jul 2003 18:50:40 -0400 Received: from fed1mtao08.cox.net ([68.6.19.123]:24547 "EHLO fed1mtao08.cox.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S271188AbTGPWuR (ORCPT ); Wed, 16 Jul 2003 18:50:17 -0400 Message-ID: <3F15DA25.5080406@cox.net> Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:05:09 -0700 From: "Kevin P. Fleming" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: 2.5 'what to expect' References: <1058395431.1481.6.camel@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <1058395431.1481.6.camel@localhost.localdomain> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Matt_Domsch@Dell.com wrote: > GNU parted has had the GPT code for a couple years now, and > CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION has been in both 2.4.x and 2.5.x trees for over a > year. To the best of my knowledge and experience, it works equally well > on x86 as on IA-64, modulo booting with traditional BIOSs of course. > When I rebuilt my server a few months back, I wanted to use GPT partitioning so I could have UUIDs on the partitions, etc. The stumbling block that I ran into is there are no boot loaders that support GPT partitioning (LILO and GRUB being the obvious ones). Even though my BIOS doesn't care and would load the MBR, that MBR has to accomplish something useful. Since GPT partitioning is normally only used in IA-64 land, and all IA-64 systems come with EFI stuff that handles the tasks that LILO/GRUB would handle on an x86 system, I guess there hasn't been much demand for GPT support for non-EFI systems. So the BIOS is not really the issue, since "traditional BIOSs" (as Matt referred to them) don't handle bootloading tasks at all except at the most basic level.