[bitofhope]

I yearn for a world where hard disk partitions are a memory of primitive times past confined to the minds of retrocomputing enthusiasts. I want my system board to have a firmware that can detect common variants of volume management including LVM and zpools, perhaps that thing Windows has that's kinda like software RAID for people into that kind of thing, perhaps even stuff like OpenBSD's softraid stuff.

1. Find physical disks that may be a part of a managed volume group/pool 2. Find logical volumes and file systems on the volume pools 3. Mount a filesystem by some configurable logic 4. Load and execute a kernel from the filesystem

Having to allocate the first "blocks" on the imaginary "sectors" of my SSD (or even worse, a virtual disk drive) for some arbitrary amount of space formatted in possibly the most barebones filesystem still in mainstream use feels quaint and irritating and limits my ability to use that disk in a larger storage pool.

UEFI is an overcomplicated specification with lots of wintel baggage, but most of it doesn't personally offend me. What does is that UEFI had the chance to abolish disk partitioning, but instead enshrined it. And added mandatory FAT32 to add insult to injury.

My main laptop and desktop each have a separate disk for the EFI system partition. The former uses systemd-boot and the latter ZFSBootMenu. This way I have a maximum of one partition per disk. It's not ideal, but I like it better than the usual solution.

The disks in my zpool show up as having partitions 1 and 9, but I consider that an implementation detail since I never need to treat the disks as anything other than entire disks in a pool