gpart, bsdlabel and fdisk

[xSAPPYx]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 6:29 PM, Aristedes Maniatis <ari at ish.com.au> wrote:
> On 22/10/09 12:16 PM, Robert Noland wrote:
> I don't understand this in the gpart manual:
>
>   "The GEOM_PART_GPT option adds support for the GUID Partition Table (GPT)
> found on Intel Itanium computers and Intel-based Macintosh computers."
>
> Why is GPT restricted to use on Macs and Itanium? As long as BIOS is able to
> load the boot sectors, shouldn't it work everywhere? Can you clarify this a
> little?

As I understand it, Macs and Itanium were just the first adopters of
EFI, the new boot method to take over the old school bios / mbr
system.
GPT is the disk partition part of EFI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
We are in the transition period between the two, with gpt being the future.
IIRC there is a 2TB limit for mbr partitioned disks... we will all be
running gpt soon enough