Re: Purpose of 'legacy_boot' attribute

[Rod Smith]

On 10/20/2011 12:00 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 20:46, Brian C. Lane<address@hidden>
> > wrote:
> > > I was also just wondering if we (Fedora) should be setting
> > > legacy_boot on /boot partitions instead of the boot flag, since
> > > the latter writes an EFI system GUID to the partition type.
> >
> >
> > Yes.
>
> The more I think about this, I'm inclined to disagree. I think that
> unless there is a specific need for setting this attribute, it should
> not be set, rather than as some kind of default. To my knowledge the
> EFI spec doesn't say these GPT attributes should be set by default,
> so I feel that they should only be set when needed for an express
> purpose.

FWIW, I agree with you on this, Chris -- an OS installer shouldn't be 
setting any GPT attribute unless the user explicitly asks it to do so or 
unless the installer installs a boot loader that requires one. That 
said, an OS installer shouldn't be CHANGING GPT attributes, either, and 
the last time I checked (a few months ago), libparted had a tendency to 
clear all attributes whenever it wrote a new partition table. I haven't 
checked this with the 3.0 version, though, so that may have changed.

--
Rod Smith
address@hidden
http://www.rodsbooks.com