Booting From an Alternate Operating System or Boot Environment

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A boot environment (BE) is a ZFS file system that is designated for booting. A boot environment is essentially a bootable instance of the Oracle Solaris OS image, plus any other software packages that are installed into that image. You can maintain multiple boot environments on a single system. Each boot environment can have different OS versions installed. When you install Oracle Solaris, a new boot environment is automatically created during the installation.

For more information, see the beadm(8) man page as well as Creating and Administering Oracle Solaris 11.4 Boot Environments.

x86 only - If the boot device as identified by GRUB contains a ZFS storage pool, then the grub.cfg file that is stored in that pool's top level dataset, which shares the same name as the pool. There is always exactly one such dataset in a pool. After the system is booted, this dataset is mounted at /pool-name on the root file system.

Multiple bootable datasets or root file systems can exist in a pool. In that pool, the default root file system is identified by the pool' s bootfs property. However, the zfs-bootfs command enables you to specify any bootable dataset to use. See the boot(8) man page.