[gentoo-releng] Fwd: grub 0.97 does not support GPT partitions

[Joshua Hoblitt]

Grub 0.97 does not including support for GPT partition tables and
upstream has stated that they have no intention of adding this support
is it is a Grub "2" feature.  Perhaps this is a pessimistic view point but
I don't believe we'll be seeing a stable Grub "2" release for some time.

This going to become a serious problem for many users in the near future
as storage devices in excess of 2TB are becoming more and more common.
We're likely just few years away from seeing single disks in this size
range.

In my case, I've encountered this issue already with 10TB RAID sets that
I'd like to be able to boot from.  I've been able to work around this
limitation in two ways.  1) cutting the RAID set up into multiple
volumes with first one being smaller than 2TB so it can host a msdos
partition table or 2) building my own liveCD with a patched version of
grub that supports GPT partition tables and using a portage overlay with
the same patched version of grub.  It is my belief that fix #2 is the
more elegant solution.  Therefore I'd like to propose that Gentoo
patches grub to support GPT partitions.  The patch that I pulled from
the grub mailing lists to add this support is attached and I can attest
that it is functional in a production environment.

Thoughts?

-J

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