FreeBSD 15.0 Install - Help with booting

[pbrazendale]

Hi all,

Long time Gentoo Linux user and want to give FreeBSD 15.0 a try, heard some good things so I am installing it on a machine which has windows 11 on it as it's a machine other family members use.

Windows 11 is installed and I have also setup rEFind tonact as a bootloader.

I have an nvme disk in the system which is currently split as the following:

/dev/nvme0n1p1 - Boot Drive (500mb)
/dev/nvme0n1p2 - Windows 11 (512GB)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 - unused space (512GB) for FreeBSD

Now I don't need a swap partition I don't believe as I have 64GB of Ram in this system, can I just mount the boot drive as '/boot' and create a UFS partition on the unused space for a / partition and move on with the installer

I want to make sure I have this right in my head before I move on and commit things to disk.

The handbook references a boot drive of 512kb but can this not just go on my boot partition I have currently?

Also do I really need /var, /usr as seperate partitions?

Thanks all coming from Linux it's a tad different but willing to learn hence my post.

Thanks

 

[SirDice]

The handbook references a boot drive of 512kb but can this not just go on my boot partition I have currently?

The freebsd-boot partition isn't a "boot" drive. It doesn't even have a filesystem, it's loaded into memory verbatim by the code in the master boot record. Depending on booting UFS or ZFS it contains the contents of gptboot(8) or gptzfsboot(8). FreeBSD doesn't have a separate /boot partition, like many Linux distributions tend to have.

Also do I really need /var, /usr as seperate partitions?

The default UFS installation creates a single (freebsd-ufs) partition mounted at /. ZFS creates a single (freebsd-zfs) partition, uses it with a single zpool; zroot, and creates multiple datasets within that pool.