Anaconda 17.24-1 reverts to msdos disklabels for new installs

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-05-01 at 16:08 -0700, Brian C. Lane wrote:
> Back in Fedora 16 we tried to advance the state of the art. We switched
> to using GPT disklabels by default, and in many cases this worked just
> fine. But it has become increasingly obvious that the hardware isn't
> ready for us. We continue to get reports of boot problems related to
> BIOS that attempt to examine the disk before booting and GPT confuses
> them -- even when we set the PMBR's boot flag.
> 
> So, for Fedora 17 we are going backwards and will wait for the world to
> catch up. What's changed:
> 
>  * msdos disklabels will be the default for disks under 2TB
>  * GPT can be forced by passing gpt on the kernel cmdline
>  * nogpt cmdline argument has been removed
> 
> This only effects BIOS installs. EFI will continue to use GPT, as will
> disks larger than 2T

Honestly, I think the practical lesson of this experience is that there
is a natural 'switchover point' for GPT by default, and that's EFI. I
don't think it's ever going to be the case that we can rely strongly
enough on BIOS installs to boot successfully from GPT disks (except in
the 2TB case obviously). I think we should just stick with MS-DOS disk
labels for native BIOS installs until we stop doing 'em. It's a pain,
but there it is...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net