Today I was honored to give a talk about ZFS Boot Environments at the third (#3) Polish BSD User Group meeting.

You are invited to download the PDF Slides – https://is.gd/BEADM – here.

As I just finished the talk the video from the talk is not yet available online, but I will update the post when it arises.

Back in 2012 I though that – then available solution – the manageBE script could be (re)written from scratch to ‘imitate’ the beadm command from Solaris/Illumos systems to make the use of Boot Environments easier and more natural. To do so I had written a small native FreeBSD beadm prototype in POSIX /bin/sh shell and shared the results of the work on the FreeBSD Forums in the HOWTO: FreeBSD ZFS Madness thread.

With the help of FreeBSD Community the beadm tool grown up into the complete native FreeBSD ZFS Boot Environment manager and later even the FreeBSD boot loader(8) has been modified/rewritten to support the selection of the ZFS Boot Environments created by the beadm script.

The attached PDF presentation explains following topics:

What ZFS Boot Environments are.

Why they are useful and what use cases it addresses.

What has been available in UNIX world before they were introduced.

What is available in the Linux world as alternative.

Practical examples in beadm usage.

History of the tools used for ZFS Boot Environments management.

If you will have the possibility and time to join the next Polish BSD User Group meeting, you will be impressed by the presence of lots BSD professionals with great attitude willing to share their ideas and experience … just like the whole FreeBSD Community. The next (#4) meeting will be organized on the 9th of August, same place as usual, Europe/Warsaw at Wheel Systems headquarters. The special guest of that meeting would be George Neville-Neil – a person that I do not have to introduce 😉

UPDATE 1 – Video Available Online

The video from the talk has been uploaded online and its available here – https://youtu.be/t84s8DSgJRs – unfortunately its in Polish not English and subtitles are not available.

UPDATE 2

The ZFS Boot Environments at PBUG article was included in the BSD Now 258 – OS Foundations episode.

Thanks for mentioning!

EOF