[arch-releng] GPT support in AIF

[Dieter Plaetinck]

On Tue, 7 Dec 2010 17:19:23 +0100
Heiko Baums <lists at baums-on-web.de> wrote:

> Am Tue, 7 Dec 2010 09:35:29 -0600
> schrieb C Anthony Risinger <anthony at extof.me>:
> 
> > how about pulling btrfs-progs into core as well?  and on that note,
> > where does btrfs stand in terms of AIF?
> 
> I'd like to see btrfs in [core] and AIF, too.
> 
> While we're on it, what's about supporting GPT (GUID Partition Table)
> in AIF? Since the harddisks are getting bigger nowadays it will soon
> be necessary as far as I know, because an MBR partition can only have
> a size of 2 TB.
> 
> Heiko

I'm not very familiar with this topic.
Nor am i familiar with the related topic of block boundary sizes and
stuff.
Although tpowa tried to explain to me, this is what I wrote down:

* don't use sfdisk or cfdisk, they don't support 1MB bootsectors (which
  is a new standard for 4k sector drives, better alignment and win7)
* parted and fdisk do.
* mbr is soon dead
* https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_4_KiB_sector_issues 
* parted is also good for GPT and uefi usage
* fdisk does not support GPT
* but parted has no (ncurses) UI

so yeah, lets figure out if this info is still up to date, and how we
should proceed. it looks like we shoud just use parted, if we can
find/make an ncurses frontend for it, all problems should be magically
solved.

Dieter