GUID Partition Table
OS family Version or edition Platform Read and write support Boot support Note
FreeBSD Since 7.0 IA-32 , x86-64 , ARM Yes Yes In a hybrid configuration , both GPT and MBR partition identifiers may be used
Linux Most of the x86 Linux distributions Fedora 8+ and Ubuntu 8.04+ IA-32 , x86-64 Yes Yes New tools such as gdisk , GNU Parted , util-linux v2.23+ fdisk , SYSLINUX , GRUB 0.96 + patches and GRUB 2 have been GPT-enabled
macOS Since 10.4.0 ( some features since 10.4.6 ) IA-32 , x86-64 , PowerPC Yes Yes Only Intel Macintosh computers can boot from GPT
MidnightBSD Since 0.4-CURRENT IA-32 , x86-64 Yes Requires BIOS In a hybrid configuration , both GPT and MBR partition identifiers may be used
NetBSD Since 6.0 x86 , x86-64 Yes In progress Some users describe their installation procedure with EFI but the official announcement of the support has not yet been made . A semi-manual UEFI installation works on NetBSD 8.0 ( -current )
OpenBSD Since 5.9 x86_64 Yes Requires UEFI
Solaris Since Solaris 10 IA-32 , x86-64 , SPARC Yes Yes
HP-UX Since HP-UX 11.20 IA-64 Yes Yes
Operating-system support -- UNIX and Unix-like systems
The GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a standard for the layout of partition tables of a physical computer storage device, such as a hard disk drive or solid-state drive, using universally unique identifiers, which are also known as globally unique identifiers (GUIDs). Forming a part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard (Unified EFI Forum-proposed replacement for the PC BIOS), it is nevertheless also used for some BIOS systems, because of the limitations of master boot record (MBR) partition tables, which use 32 bits for logical block addressing (LBA) of traditional 512-byte disk sectors. All modern personal computer operating systems support GPT. Some, including macOS and Microsoft Windows on the x86 architecture, support booting from GPT partitions only on systems with EFI firmware, but FreeBSD and most Linux distributions can boot from GPT partitions on systems with both legacy BIOS firmware interface and EFI.