Quote ticket calamares - use gpt by default:
- Patrick: bug: unencrypted installations are mbr by default
- Patrick: todo: port from master boot record (MBR) to GUID Partition Table (GPT), if sane
- Aaron: Likely not a good idea until a Calamares release with Hybrid bootloader (BIOS+UEFI) installation support by ArrayBolt3 · Pull Request #2422 · calamares/calamares · GitHub in it is made (the version in Trixie doesn’t have this yet). We’d have to introduce a bios-grub partition unconditionally on both EFI and BIOS, and only one bootloader would be installed. This would mean that BIOS systems would end up with a bios_boot partition and no ESP, while EFI systems would get both bios_boot and ESP partitions but only an EFI bootloader installed. Once the linked PR is present in a release, we will be able to always have both partitions and both bootloaders.
- Aaron: Technically GRUB can be installed on BIOS systems without a bios_boot partition, but
grub-installmust be run with--forceto do this, and the bootloader may break at any time if this is done. See Their whole art, is this: “It is impossible to cogitate this systematic.
The blocklists are unreliable because the filesystems can move the files around at will and so the exact sectors are subject to change. Any such change creates both a reliability and security problem. Previously the blocks were only rarely moved around. However, now, with features like tail repacking and online defragmenter it will become increasingly of a problem.