Re: GPT vs BSD-label

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Mon, 8 Feb 2016 15:41:41 -0800
    From:        John Nemeth <jnemeth%cue.bc.ca@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <201602082342.u18Ngfw5029915@server>

[Caution: crappy kre memory dump below... treat it as random gibberish...]

  | The first release of BSD was in 1977,

That's true, but hardly relevant, BSD1 was not any kind of complete OS,
it was a set of utilities (and some patches) that you applied to an
existing system (this one was to 6th edn unix).   2BSD was the same,
just contained more (I mean the original 2BSD, not the 2.n systems that
came after 4BSD which were BSD system retro-fits to pdp-11's)  The first
complete (as in bootable as it came) BSD was 3BSD (late 1979?)

  | In 1988, an 80MB HD would have been huge and probably
  | not available for the type of machines that BSD ran on.

That's about a decade out - might have been true (just) in 1978
perhaps, but expensive 300MB drives (RP06?), and then (much cheaper)
Eagles (320MB) came in the fairly early 80's - I suspect RP06's were probably
supported in 7th edition for pdp11's and 32V for vaxen, both of which preceded 
3BSD - after which disc sizes stagnated for years.   By 1988 though, I think
the first 600MB and GB drives would have been around, and ever since things
have just grown.

  | which means 2TB was unfathomable.

But that was certainly true.  A system with a couple of GB (total, usually
spread over several drives, and without any kind of raid/ccd/lvm to
aggregate them) would have been considered very well endowed indeed.
1000 times as much - absurd!

  | Given the constraints of the time, disklabel
  | was a reasonable format.  However, time tends to blow away all
  | constraints.

Agreed, it is time for disklabel to (gradually) die away, just expanding it
to 64 bit numbers makes little sense - it is still a whole new format,
but still suffers from other limitations (like having to fit in a sector),
GPT is kind of overblown, but it is what is being used these days, and it
has the potential to support everything for a very long time, and is
certainly very flexible).   There's no point invention something different
just so we can be different, just use GPT, there's nothing fundamentally
wrong with it.

kre