Re: what 3rd party boot mgr is required to boot multiple freebsd versions?

On 17/03/2020 12:58, Florian Limberger wrote:
> On 16.03.20 23:33, Chris wrote:
> 
>> For the record. I'm *only* using FreeBSD in this situation. I
>> only mentioned Windows above, for the use of it's boot manager.
> 
> If you only use FreeBSD, and also use ZFS, you might find beadm[1]
> interesting.
> 
> [1]: https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/beadm
> 

Did you know that the system now comes with bectl(8) which is very
similar to beadm?  As far as I can tell, the biggest difference is that
if you have more than one ZFS in your boot environment then:

    beadm create FOO

is actually equivalent to

    bectl create -r FOO

ie. turning on the recursive functionality in bectl.

However, this is not really what the OP was asking about.  As I
understand it, they were looking for something that would allow choosing
between several independent installations of different versions of
FreeBSD, rather than having multiple environments in the same
installation.  You can achieve pretty much the same effect though --
there is a boot menu option to switch between BEs.  You would have to
manage any ported software between the different OS versions, perhaps by
including /usr/local and /var/db/pkg are both parts of your BEs.

	Cheers,

	Matthew