[arch-releng] GPT support in AIF

[Dwight Schauer]

On 12/07/2010 12:59 PM, Heiko Baums wrote:
> Am Tue, 7 Dec 2010 18:54:29 +0100
> schrieb Dieter Plaetinck<dieter at plaetinck.be>:
>> 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.
> I'm not familiar with GPT, too. I got to know it at FrOSCon 2010 at the
> FreeBSD booth. Nevertheless it looked quite interesting and is
> necessary for partitions bigger than 2 TB.
>
> I don't know its usability, but there's a CLI tool for GPT:
> gdisk resp. GPT fdisk
> http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/index.html
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/
>

I've been using gdisk (specifically sgdisk) for a while now to do Arch 
Linux installs on GPT partitioned disks. I use Syslinux for booting as 
that has good GPT support for legacy (non  UEFI) BIOSes. I submitted 
patches (which were accepted and are in sgdisk 0.6.13) to the gdisk 
project to add attribute bit setting in sgdisk (needed to boot from a 
GPT partition).

Since my installs are scripted I don't need an ncurses front end. My 
disk setup script also takes over the whole disk (I provide it with 
partition sizes in a text file), which is not a limitation of AIF from 
what I've seen. My disk setup script script also installs Syslinux on 
the /boot partition and makes it able to boot.

I developed my own setup/install scripts back in May of this year, 
primarily because AIF did not support GPT and Syslinux, but I may be 
able to contribute to AIF development is desired so that I can use AIF 
instead of my custom set up scripts. (I've not looked in AIF that much, 
I do some automated scripted post install configuration and pull in 
other files which I don't know if AIF supports, I need to read up on it 
more).

All this to say I would be a lot more interested in AIF if it had full 
GPT and Syslinux support, and I'd be willing to contribute to AIF 
development if necessary to make that happen if AIF would end up meeting 
my needs.

--
Dwight Schauer