On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 9:52 AM, Phil Turmel <philip@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > These are good reasons. I have also seen reports of NAS devices/distros > unconditionally partitioning devices that don't have one. Although I > have in the past used raw devices with mdadm, I don't plan to do so with > any future systems. I'm in this same boat. Historically I've used raw devices, no partitioning, but I'm going to GPT partition everything from here on out, even if it's just a single partition. a. It makes it unambiguous this drive has had some purpose, it's not a blank slate. b. GPT is unambiguous, checksummed, has redundancy, and a user definable partition name 72 bytes UTF-16E to make it even more unambiguous c. The MBR had too few type codes, leading to a lot of ambiguity as to a partition's contents, so on Linux the idea was for libblkid to have a thorough understanding of (most) every conceivable volume format signature. But GPT solves this in a more standard way, and the explosion of undefined volume formats and binary blobs installed on partitions has made keeping up with their identification in blkid increasingly challenging. So anyway... GPT is good. And when LUKS2 gets a little farther along the torture testing I'll move to that as well, as it too has redundant metadata. -- Chris Murphy -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
