[CFC/CFT] large changes in the loader(8) code

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Jun 27, 2012, at 12:08 PM, Christian Laursen wrote:

> On 06/27/12 16:28, John Baldwin wrote:
>> On Wednesday, June 27, 2012 8:45:45 am Andrey V. Elsukov wrote:
>> 
>>> When we are in the FreeBSD, our loader can detect that device size
>>> is lower than it see and it will work. When primary header is OK, then
>>> other OSes should work with this GPT. When it isn't OK, you just can't
>>> load other OS :)
>> 
>> Ah, yes.  The solution to violating standards is to make sure you never
>> use standards-compliant software.  That's a great argument. :)
>> 
>> (Although not entirely uncommon.  Standards aren't always perfect, but if
>> we had a way to not gratuitously violate them it would be nice to avoid
>> doing so.)
> 
> To be standards compliant and allow whole-disk based mirroring to work at the same time wouldn't nested GPT work like this?

GPTs don't nest.

> Nothing but FreeBSD would understand the freebsd-geom partition type, so the inner GPT device should be valid and standards compliant.

If it were standards compliant, it would be discoverable by non-FreeBSD.
That clearly isn't the case -- hence it's not standards compliant. What
for example if someone wanted to share the swap partition between Linux
and FreeBSD?

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
marcel at xcllnt.net