[arch-releng] GPT support in AIF

[Heiko Baums]

Am Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:06:45 -0700
schrieb "John T. Wilkinson" <john.t.wilkinson at dartmouth.edu>:

> I believe this is accurate.  I have used GPT for large raid arrays on 
> other Linux distros.  The prevailing way to deal with GPT is to leave
> it out of the installer, configure the OS on a non GPT partition,
> then after install to use parted to make the GPT partitions.  I
> believe to boot to a GPT partition you need EFI or UEFI, booting to
> GPT from a regular bios is not well supported, and most motherboards
> presently do not have EFI/UEFI except for some enterprise servers.

Not quite right as far as I know. It was primarily intended for
EFI/UEFI, but now runs with BIOS, too.

But first installing a system and then make GPT partitions wouldn't
make much sense particularly if you need to install the system onto a
partition bigger than 2 TB even if this partition only contains /home.

> A good first step that would put Arch beyond other distros from what 
> I've seen would be support for non-boot GPT partitions in the
> installer via parted.

There should not only non-boot GPT partitions. It should be possible
to be able to building the whole partitioning scheme as GPT.

I don't know if it would be possible to mix MBR and GPT partitions
anyway.

Heiko