Saturday 7th February 2015 6.13pm

Just spent a few hours scratching my head about how to install a custom FreeBSD kernel on a ZFS on root install. It turns out that your boot config lives in its own self contained ZFS snapshot which is managed by a utility called 'beadm'. The idea is if you screw up, when you revert to an older boot you really do genuinely get an unmodified undamaged previous boot config. Once this was realised things have gone much easier, but I was there trawling through the grub custom config scripts trying to figure out how it scans for kernel boot options …