[PATCH] x86: check for gpt header in platform_check_image

[Philip Prindeville]

> On Jan 14, 2026, at 12:40 PM, Jonas Lochmann <openwrt at jonaslochmann.de> wrote:
> 
> Am Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 04:36:11PM -0700, schrieb Philip Prindeville:
>> While you're in there, can you fix the partition table stuff so that /var can be made persistent?
> 
> That's completly unrelated to this topic.
> 
>> Possibly adding a package that converts a system that didn't have a
>> persistent /var to one that creates a partition out of the remaining
>> free space, formats it, creates the appropriate subdirectories, and
>> writes out an /etc/fstab entry...
> 
> That's a very bad design idea. This is a very bad fit for an extra
> package and adjusting the partition layout by installing a package
> is a bad idea like programatically updating the fstab file. We
> don't have systemd and its mount units here, but there are other
> methods to mount something.


What's worse design is having different behavior on different platforms.

As @dangowrt pointed out, setting up an x86 box to use an SSD or NVMe to have persistent /var is hard to do because of the way it operates differently from every other platform.

-Philip



> 
> The traditional GPT is too unflexible for that - the OpenWrt image
> size could change. Or you have your custom partition first and OpenWrt
> in the end so that shrinking the extra partition later is possible.
> 
> So to make the extra partition possible, the sysupgrade process
> would need to extract the new efi and system partition to replace
> this partitions only. Then you can do what you want with the
> remaining disk - as long as no one increases the partition sizes
> because updates would fail then.