It's not necessary to start at sector 40.
The designation is not FEI, it's EFI, or UEFI. Yes, it's something different. You can read all about it here:
Sorry, that was a writing mistake (FEI), naturally I mean EFI/UEFI.
And no, your link don't clarify anything because there are only dare description about EFI on Linux, Windows and Mac-OS but not in BSD.
Beside, this don't clarify how the "GUI-installer" handle the EFI-partition, where put it exactly and if recognize the native 4k-sectors properly.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source in this case but the experts of FreeBSD and hence I ask here and not wikipedia to include an article for EFI on FreeBSD.
Pointing me (or anybody else) to wikipedia article is a very bad idea, I don't like it at all, is not polite (to send client to pastry to ask how is the pork-tenderloin), sorry!
And I prove it using the ext4 file-system as an example:
If you have a disk with native (already 10 years old) 4k-sectors, the
Ext4 file-system don't recognize it at all, but relay on what is listening from Kernel, if the kernel is well/right configured or loaded.
This mean ext4-fs is blind but hear/listen from kernel, here the prove:
mkfs.ext4 -F -b 4096 -F $DISK-part2
as you can see, the use of switch/option
-F (that mean FORCE) is needed
twice to oblige ext4 to recognize the 4k-sector on themselves and not only listening from kernel.
The same is valid for
vfat and
linux-swap,,,
fat32 don't work at all but, these are other stories.
The conclusion about Linux-file-systems on 4k disks is:
- The partitioning ==> setting partitions-boundaries (partitions-delimitations) in GPT is OK and contains
FAT32 (EFI, code: ef00),
ext4 (
/ called also root, code: 8300) and
linux-swap (code: 8200).
- The formatting is NOT OK ==> EFI: force
vfat and 4k-bs (block-size), ROOT: force 4k-bs twice, SWAP: set ps (page-size= block-size) to 4096=4k
Now you can read the wikipedia article on ext4 and tell me (afterwards) if any of this topics are handled or at least mentioned with one word in the article.
And, how will you feel if you ask me about ext4 and I post a wikipedia-article instead? It's not shaming to say "I don't know"! And, yes, I (myself) don't know anything about Freebsd and hence ask here.
Listen: Screens have controllers with EDID-information, disks have controllers telling how big is a data-carrier, the sectors-size and so on, GPUs have controllers, each piece of hardware have a controller sending information about itself, but... data-carriers/disks are the most important piece of HW where all the information and data of an OS are stored on them, that allow the OS to work at all / boot.
It's not like reload EDID in xorg or install GPU-driver after the installation. If disks are not handled well/properly, you cannot boot at all, and you have no possibility to remedy to it at all.
If you (or anybody else here) cannot tell me how to remove efi-boot-loader (safely) from first MiB of disk without damaging the disk same for using this same disk as file-storage or to use it with another OS (installing another OS on it), I will not risk wasting a 2TB NVMe costs 250-350$ only for experimenting with FreeBSD. I will not even waste a USB-stick for that, for it are VMs (virtual machines) that don't tell almost anything about a real (bare-metal) OS.
We/I still talking about just normal/standard FreeBSD with own "GUI-installer" hence "Auto-ZFS", we/I not talking now (anymore) about special partitioning or "rEFInd + zbm (zfs-boot-manager) + FreeBSD + Artix-Linux + Debian" like
here.
