Bug 242954

Last year I reported https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=232463 ("EBR slice cannot be added partitions to"), had a long conversation with Andrey V. Elsukov (ae@FreeBSD.org) and finally succeeded in having the issue assigned to geom@FreeBSD.org

Come 2019 and Release 12.1, the issue still remains sticking like a sore throat with absolutely no action taken. This is no fun.

I am a very conventional person who hates new technologies like UEFI and GPT. GPT in particular bothers me because it won't let me use boot0cfg when I absolutely adore the boot0 manager, which only works with MBR. When partitioning a disk, I always use the MBR schema and then put boot0 to the first block of the disk. I further like to use an EBR slice to hold my secondary partitions because all operating systems can read/write to EBR partitions. My pain lies in the fact that FreeBSD can create the EBR slice, create the EBR schema on that slice and then, lo, will refuse to add/delete partitions in the EBR slice.

It has been pointed out to me that I can recompile the kernel without the default EBR_COMPAT option to make EBR functional. This is stupid - this means that every time I install FreeBSD, I have to recompile the kernel when EBR_COMPAT could so easily be suppressed by default by the makers of FreeBSD.

A few days ago, I installed FreeBSD 12.1 and then, instead of recompiling the kernel, I purchased a second disk on which I installed Linux simply to add partitions to the EBR slice. Isn't that funny ? And do the FreeBSD makers intend to let this situation continue ? Please understand that no user in modern times will go through the torture of recompiling the kernel, particularly when the default kernel should be doing the sensible thing in the first place.

It can be argued that I can do without the EBR slice by limiting myself to 4 MBR slices. It's a good argument, but then creates the funny situation that all secondary DOS/NTFS/Ext2 slices start showing up in the boot0 manager even when they are not bootable. If all the secondary slices were instead EBR partitions, the boot0 manager would simply and rightly refuse to show them, keeping the user well-informed at boot time which slice is bootable.

If I were on my deathbed, my last wish would be that the makers of FreeBSD suppress EBR_COMPAT in the default kernel configuration.


Thank you - and really looking forward to a resolution this time,
Manish Jain