Request for comments, new geom part type alias: freebsd-geom

[Eugene Grosbein]

30.07.2018 7:52, David Cross wrote:

> Just a named GPT UUID type, like freebsd-swap, freebsd-ufs
> 
> As for ambiguous data: consider you have a RAID 10 of a UFS filesystem. 
> If you put that into freebsd-ufs freebsd-boot will see that and potentially attempt to boot it.

One should just be allowed to mark such a partition "unbootable" so no loader even tries to boot it.
And use any kind of label you like including freebsd-ufs.

We should not "workaround" deficiencies of our loaders (if any) but fix it
instead of invention of new partition types just for that strange reason.

> If you have a raw raid gstripe, what shows up to the BIOS as to what this drives is depends
> entirely  on the _contents_ of the drive at a specific position, information that could be controlled by a user.

Why is it important how BIOS shows gstripe'd partitions if they are marked not bootable?

There were times when BIOSes unconditionally booted from floppy disk drive if it had readable floppy disk
at boot time, so boot area of such floppy disks had special code saying "Non-system disk, replace and strike a key"
if a floppy was not supposed to be bootable. Boot area of our non-bootable partitions might have something similar.