Hey I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system), who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current motherboards have support for this. Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech misguided? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov
On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 06:45:36PM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote:> I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT > partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that > I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel > D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now > I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I > contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system), > who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is > supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current > motherboards have support for this. > > Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech misguided?For what it's worth, I've never encountered any production x86 system that I've worked on (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris 10, or OpenSolaris) which has used GPT. I don't know who's giving you the impression that "everyone and their dog is using GPT". Why is this feature a deal-breaker for you? Why are you giving it so much attention? -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc@parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
According to Dan Naumov:> who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is > supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current > motherboards have support for this.The Dell T3500 I just configured was announced in March 2009 IIRC and it is booting off GPT just fine. Didn't do anything special for that. Then again, I do not see non GPT support as a deal breaker (even for ZFS). -- Ollivier ROBERT -=- FreeBSD: The Power to Serve! -=- roberto@keltia.freenix.fr In memoriam to Ondine : http://ondine.keltia.net/
GPT booting is I believe only natively supported using an EFI BIOS. However if you wish to use GPT booting with FreeBSD its not too hard, you just cant install using sysinstall. The Examples section of the gpart manpage is what i used to configure the disk for my home server, a zotac ion atom based board (dont have any production servers at work using it at the moment.) Then i just installed using the files on the usb image.>From what I understand gpart installs the pmbr file as a basic bootstrapin the protective MBR present in the GPT partition scheme, this is bootable by a standard bios and is able to understand enough GPT to look for a freebsd boot partition, load the bootcode in that, which loads the kernel etc. So no they arent completely misguided, but its certainly possible to use a GPT scheme without an EFI BIOS. What I would like is an efi bootloader for i386 so I can get my powerbook to run FreeBSD again as it has got an efi bios and bootcamp wont boot freebsd for me at the moment :( Vince Dan Naumov wrote:> Hey > > I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT > partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that > I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel > D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now > I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I > contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system), > who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is > supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current > motherboards have support for this. > > Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech misguided? > > > - Sincerely, > Dan Naumov > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" >
On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 06:45:36PM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote:> Hey > > I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT > partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that > I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel > D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now > I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I > contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system), > who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is > supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current > motherboards have support for this. > > Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech misguided?The compatability MBR should be sufficent to let a non-GPT aware BIOS boot from GPT. Once you've loaded code from the boot partition, the BIOS doesn't need to know anything about the partitions. -- Brooks -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20100127/2483d2b4/attachment.pgp
on 27/01/2010 18:45 Dan Naumov said the following:> Hey > > I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT > partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that > I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel > D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now > I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I > contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system), > who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is > supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current > motherboards have support for this. > > Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech misguided?Perhaps both :-) It depends on what booting capabilities you need from your BIOS. With FreeBSD we currently typically don't use "pure" GPT and use Protective MBR and install real boot code into a special boot partition. Protective MBR looks like a "normal" MBR to BIOS, and boot code in Protective MBR is smart to find the boot partition and hand off boot process to code in it. This way you can almost have the best of both worlds, but with some limitations (like multibooting). I don't know what other OSes do or expect in this area. Obligatory wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table#Legacy_MBR_.28LBA_0.29 -- Andriy Gapon
On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Dan Naumov <dan.naumov@gmail.com> wrote:> Hey > > I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT > partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that > I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel > D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now > I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I > contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system), > who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is > supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current > motherboards have support for this. > > Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech > misguided? > >I'm booting servers with SuperMicro X8STi-F motherboards just fine using pmbr + GPT + ZFS. Matt
On Wednesday 27 January 2010 11:45:36 am Dan Naumov wrote:> Hey > > I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT > partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that > I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel > D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now > I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I > contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system), > who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is > supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current > motherboards have support for this. > > Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech misguided?GPT was defined along with EFI, so many folks assume that you have to use EFI to boot a GPT-labelled disk. However, FreeBSD has its own BIOS-based bootstrap that can handle GPT-labelled disks. I doubt the SuperMicro tech is familiar with that case. I thought I heard that some folks had added GPT support to grub as well. -- John Baldwin