Rubenerd

Brad Alexander emailed asking how I dual-boot my FreeBSD workstation that doubles as a Linux Steam game machine.

I must confess, I use the BIOS boot menu!

I used to use grub, but lately I’ve decoupled OSs to their own SSDs. The FreeBSD NVMe drive boots by default, but striking F11 at boot brings up the motherboard’s “boot override” menu where I can select the SATA drive with Linux.

There are a few advantages to this approach:

• No further configuration after installing each OS.

• Drives can be physically removed, upgraded, or wiped without affecting the other OS and its partitions.

• Less stressful OS upgrades, because you won’t inadvertently wipe the boot loader the other OS needs.

• Faster boots to a primary OS; FreeBSD in my case. With an active boot menu, you’re always choosing an OS or waiting for a timeout.

The biggest drawback is you need two separate drives, or four if you run mirrored pairs as I do on my FreeBSD bhyve NAS. That might prove expensive if you’re on a budget, and if this is your primary computer.

My aging Skylake board only has one NVMe slot, which means a mirrored zpool would only write as fast as a SATA. The Ryzen Z570 boards I’m looking at have two NVMe slots that run at comparable speeds, which would make mirroring tenable again.