[parted-devel] [PATCH] Synchronise MBR tables with GPT

[Matthew Garrett]

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 03:32:15PM +0100, Olaf Hering wrote:

> But I did not have time yet to actually look at the involved code.
>  From what I have seen up to now, it all has to be primary.
> And there is one fake (?) GPT partition #1 in any case.

Partition #1 will generally be the EFI system partition. Under Linux, 
this is usually used to store elilo and possibly a copy of the kernel. 
MacOS only seems to use it for firmware upgrades. It's not strictly 
necessary. The existing GPT code in Parted writes an MBR with a single 
partition that covers the entire disk, which avoids legacy applications 
from getting confused about the partitioning. The issue with that is 
that we want to be able to run legacy applications (like Windows or 
Linux...) on GPT disks now.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org