bectl: The Essential Guide to FreeBSD Boot Environments
bectl: The Essential Guide to FreeBSD Boot Environments Table of contents:- A Brief History of Boot Environments and bectl Unique Features of bectl How to Use bectl Properly Other Boot Environment Tools in FreeBSD Conclusion A Brief History of Boot Environments and bectl The concept of boot environments (BEs) revolutionised system management on ZFS-based platforms . Boot environments are essentially bootable clones of the root filesystem, allowing users to upgrade, patch, or experiment with their systems while preserving the ability to roll back to a previous, stable state if anything goes awry. This approach, first popularised in Solaris , found its way into FreeBSD through the beadm utility, which was later succeeded by bectl as the native, integrated tool for managing BEs in FreeBSD. bectl was introduced as part of the 2017 Google Summer of Code, building upon the groundwork laid by beadm and leveraging the new libbe library for more seamless integration with FreeBSD’s base s...