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

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 11:31 PM Eugene Grosbein <eugen at grosbein.net> wrote:

> 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.
>

How does one do that?

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.
>

Normally this is a non issue.

> 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.
>

No. They don't. There is no standard way to mark something unbootable...

Warner

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