Translations:Handbook:SPARC/Blocks/Disks/46/en

Although it is theoretically possible to use a raw, unpartitioned disk to house a Linux system (when creating a btrfs RAID for example), this is almost never done in practice. Instead, disk block devices are split up into smaller, more manageable block devices. On systems, these are called partitions. There are currently two standard partitioning technologies in use: Sun and GPT; the latter is supported only on more recent systems with a sufficiently recent firmware.