on i386 and amd64 machines. The overall process is that /boot/pmbr lives
in the PMBR (similar to /boot/mbr for MBR disks) and is responsible for
locating and loading /boot/gptboot. /boot/gptboot is similar to /boot/boot
except that it groks GPT rather than MBR + bsdlabel. Unlike /boot/boot,
/boot/gptboot lives in its own dedicated GPT partition with a new
"FreeBSD boot" type. This partition does not have a fixed size in that
/boot/pmbr will load the entire partition into the lower 640k. However,
it is limited in that it can only be 545k. That's still a lot better than
the current 7.5k limit for boot2 on MBR. gptboot mostly acts just like
boot2 in that it reads /boot.config and loads up /boot/loader. Some more
details:
- Include uuid_equal() and uuid_is_nil() in libstand.
- Add a new 'boot' command to gpt(8) which makes a GPT disk bootable using
/boot/pmbr and /boot/gptboot. Note that the disk must have some free
space for the boot partition.
- This required exposing the backend of the 'add' function as a
gpt_add_part() function to the rest of gpt(8). 'boot' uses this to
create a boot partition if needed.
- Don't cripple cgbase() in the UFS boot code for /boot/gptboot so that
it can handle a filesystem > 1.5 TB.
- /boot/gptboot has a simple loader (gptldr) that doesn't do any I/O
unlike boot1 since /boot/pmbr loads all of gptboot up front. The
C portion of gptboot (gptboot.c) has been repocopied from boot2.c.
The primary changes are to parse the GPT to find a root filesystem
and to use 64-bit disk addresses. Currently gptboot assumes that the
first UFS partition on the disk is the / filesystem, but this algorithm
will likely be improved in the future.
- Teach the biosdisk driver in /boot/loader to understand GPT tables.
GPT partitions are identified as 'disk0pX:' (e.g. disk0p2:) which is
similar to the /dev names the kernel uses (e.g. /dev/ad0p2).
- Add a new "freebsd-boot" alias to g_part() for the new boot UUID.
MFC after: 1 month
Discussed with: marcel (some things might still change, but am committing
what I have so far)
f352a0d45f