# Boot environments and FreeBSD 10.3



## NewGuy (Apr 5, 2016)

I have been using boot environments with ZFS on PC-BSD/TrueOS for a year or so now and really like them. It's nice to be able to reboot and simply rollback the last update if something went wrong.

Since FreeBSD 10.3 reports supports for boot environments I gave it a whirl today. I installed the beadm port, created a couple of boot environments and rebooted. As it turns out, selecting any boot environment from the boot menu (option #7) causes the system to hang while booting. A bunch of errors appear on the screen saying stdin can't be found, the network doesn't come up and the system never gets as far as presenting a login prompt.

But, I know boot environments are set up correctly because if I sign in under the active boot environment and use "beadm activate" to switch to another boot environment, I can reboot the system into that boot environment.

Basically, FreeBSD can boot into any BE set as the active environment by beadm, but trying to switch to an alternative BE from the boot menu always fails. Has anyone else experienced this? Not being able to select a boot environment at boot time seems to negate the purpose of having the technology so I'm wondering if FreeBSD requires an extra setting or something to switch BEs at boot time?


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## JesseJames (Apr 7, 2016)

Yes I have the same problem (UEFI boot menu) and a friend has the same problem (old boot menu).
It seems that they have not tested this feature...

I filled a bug report: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=208601


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## JesseJames (May 20, 2016)

```
"> Allan Jude [IMG]https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/images/committer.png[/IMG] 2016-05-20 01:32:03 UTC
This happens if 'canmount' is set to 'yes' instead of the intended 'noauto' on any of the boot environments.

A fix to beadm has been submitted upstream.
```


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## ANOKNUSA (May 21, 2016)

In the meantime, does setting "bootfs" on multiple ZFS filesystems have any effect on the menu options or their ability to boot? I haven't had a chance to try it myself, but I don't think sysutils/beadm is actually required to use boot environments...


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