Hacker News Reader

Boot environment is just a fancy term for root filesystem clones created from snapshots.

Fyi: snapshots are read-only. Normal, read-writable filesystem can be created by `zfs clone root@snap newroot`.

I read the entire article as I was interested in that aspect too. Misleading title.

A common pattern with beadm on FreeBSD is for the root filesystem dataset to be called "ROOT", and this mirrors what's in the main article. It appears this person has boot environments enabled, but didn't actually explain anything about them.

ZFS boot environments are awesome. You can get them on both FreeBSD and Illumos with beadm. On Linux there are a number of utilities, but I've only used ZSys. It comes working out of the box if you do a ZFS-on-root install with Ubuntu.