Followup to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
By author: Neil Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Since writing the above, I've been searching for more info. I
> downloaded four different versions of grub (GNU Grub Legacy, GNU Grub2,
> gentoo and Fedora Core 3). NONE of these showed any evidence of GPT
> support (I was in a hurry, so I searched for strings EFI, GUID, GPT,
> TB).
>
> Mucho confused puppy here.
>
> I fail to see how grub can work on a GPT boot device if it can't parse
> the partition table. I conclude that I'm still missing something.
> Perhaps a layer before grub is supposed to parse the GPT instead? If
> so, isn't that getting us straight back to a GPT-aware BIOS?
>
> Tell me if this logic is broken: even if a special boot sector is used,
> which IS GPT-aware (though fitting that into the boot sector would be a
> challenge ;-)), once grub loads, it's still going to have to figure out
> how to find the root(hdX,Y) partition from which to load the kernel
> image. This surely means it has to have either a GPT-parser
> internally, or rely on a pre-parsed list. No?
>
> Perhaps one of the other several distros (that I didn't check) has a
> GPT-aware grub. But Tomas Carnecky said early in this thread that
> gentoo had allowed him to set up a GPT-booting system on x86. I guess
> it's possible that a cheat was used - maybe an old-style partition
> table in the MBR was used to define the first (boot) partition, but
> surely that's forbidden by the whole EFI spec anyway?
>
No, it's encouraged.
>
> Andries Brouwer kindly wrote a patch which I haven't had time to test
> yet (see earlier in thread). While it would be nice to find a way
> around the problem which didn't require deviations from vanilla
> distros, I think Andries' patch is looking like the only sane fix right
> now.
>
Note that Andries' patch does *EXACTLY* the same thing as the GPT/EFI
spec does (by using an old-style partition table for the first 2 TB.)
It should be pretty easy to add native support for this in EXTLINUX;
the big problem is supporting true access > 2 TB, which I currently
don't have any way to test.
I'll put that on my todo list.
-hpa
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