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

[Eugene Grosbein]

30.07.2018 12:42, Warner Losh:

>> 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...

For UEFI case there is the BootOrder list useful for this particular task.