2026-09-26 05:57 UTC
@jaypatelani@bsd.network
I don't want to spoil the #retrocomputing fun, but for those new to the BSDs who do not have the context and might come away thinking that they should move from GUID partitioning, or even MBR-style partitioning with LBAs, to disk labels:
The "BSD disklabel" is a partitioning scheme from 1988 that can destroy your GUID partitioning or boot loader if accidentally mis-used. #NetBSD, #OpenBSD, and #FreeBSD haven't agreed on disklabel partition types since IBM's JFS2. They don't agree on what the types for ZFS or HAMMER2 partitions are, for example. It is 32-bit, occasionally 16-bit, in some fields, and mostly has the old 2TiB size limits that the GUID system overcame with 64-bit addressing at the turn of this century. And the on-disk data structures are no longer even compatible as of OpenBSD discontinuing 'v0' in 2025 (with a somewhat optimistic note in the version control history that no-one has written that to disc since 2007).
#disklabel #bsdlabel
Replies (1)
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@raster@retro-gaiden.com 2026-09-26 17:54
@JdeBP@mastodonapp.uk @jaypatelani@bsd.network I believe the BSD partition scheme was meant for the pre-UEFI non-X86 machines (like the SPARK servers) where disks were handled in a different way than the MBR scheme. It was not meant for X86 platform, and GPT is made for replace all these schemes with something more reliable and universal.