[parted-devel] bios_grub needs a brief description

[Jim Meyering]

Robert Millan wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:50:11PM +0200, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> Hi Robert,
>>
>> The bios_grub flag was added with this commit:
>>
>>   http://git.debian.org/?p=parted/parted.git;a=commitdiff;h=b65f8e479aac6ca
>>
>> but was accompanied by no documentation update.
>>
>> The following is probably too vague.
>> Robert, can you provide a better description?
>
> Hi Jim,
>
> I wrote this for GRUB wiki a while ago:
>
>   http://grub.enbug.org/BIOS_Boot_Partition

[from another message
> Maybe something shorter would do, like:
>
> @item bios_grub
> (GPT) - Mark the selection partition as usable for BIOS-based boot, so that
> bootloaders that use static embedding (like GNU GRUB) can put their boot
> code in it.

Thank you.

> In any case, I recommend reading that wiki page, it provides an extensive
> explanation on what a BIOS Boot partition is useful for.
...
>> Would it make sense to extend this to any other partition table format?
>
> Most likely not.  It is intimately tied to the presence of MBR boot code
> (URL above should clarify that).

Why not?
Couldn't I have such a partition on a disk with an msdos partition table?

Actually, rather than documenting that, I am
now inclined to deprecate the bios_grub flag:

    parted /dev/sda set <partition_number> bios_grub on

Instead, parted would allow that type to be specified upon
partition creation:

    parted /dev/sda mkpart name bios_grub START END

And possibly via a new command to set partition type in general.

Assigning a partition type is already done as part of partition creation,
so it seems more logical simply to add one more type name to the list
than to create a new "flag" every time a new type comes along.

What do you think of that?