SNEAK PEEK: ZFS Boot Environment Feature Coming to pfSense Plus Software v24.03

[eaxtell]

Check out the NEW ZFS Boot Environment feature with Christian McDonald!

Let us know what you think. Thanks for watching!

EDIT: Corrected video link

[Bob.Dig]

I like short shorts but not those. But you can click there to get to the real video.

[eaxtell]

@Bob-Dig Good catch Bob! I put the wrong link here. Thank you for letting us know.

EDIT: Link is updated in top post now. Thanks again!

[SteveITS]

@eaxtell That does seem really cool. Will it be automatic? (There was a lot of clicking and I’m on a phone)

The other BE thing that gets posted occasionally already is being out of space due to piled up BEs from prior upgrades….

[mer]

Cool. I'm a FreeBSD user for a long time, have always preferred ZFS even on single disk systems because of Boot Environments.

Doing a major upgrade I've always done the "create a new BE, mount it, chroot to it and do the upgrade" process.
That lets you do the upgrade kernel, upgrade userlande, upgrade all the packages into the new BE while you are still running, then when you boot into that newly created BE everything is consistent, so you have a lot less risk of things going bad. They still can, but that's where the bootonce flag comes in. If the system fails to boot up completely (where the flag gets cleared) reboot and you are back to pre upgrade.

Automating this process is a very good thing to have. Very good stuff Netgate.