FreeBSD Has A New ZFS Boot Management Tool & Library

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects within the BSD realm this summer was working on a new boot management tool and library for ZFS on FreeBSD. It's still in the works, but progress is being made.

The GSoC goal was building a framework for managing ZFS boot environments on FreeBSD. The library that formed is libbe while the be utility can be used from the command-line for managing the boot environment.

This ZFS boot environment management code made a good start during GSoC with a lot of the basic functionality complete from mount/unmount to other functionality. The create functionality isn't quite ready yet nor is the Jails support.

If you are a FreeBSD ZFS user, you can learn more about the project's work via this Wiki page.