Dual and Multi Booting FreeBSD, Linux, and OpenBSD with GNU Grub

FreeBSD Installs

Of the three operating systems discussed here, FreeBSD has the most robust and flexible partitioning software and the greatest flexibility of where it can be placed. FreeBSD's fdisk can detect and display four slices as well as the disk boot sectors and any unused space if the slices have not consumed it all. Fdisk can delete any disk partition it sees and can put a slice into any free space, up to the four permitted. If the first four partitions leave sufficient free space, fdisk appears to create a fifth if you try, but the name is an 'X' instead of a valid device name such as 'ad0s4', the last valid partition on the first hard disk.

One weakness of the FreeBSD install is that it provides no "Back" options. You can press [Ctrl+Alt+Delete] at any time during a FreeBSD install, and the install process will give you a choice of Abort, Restart, or Continue which do what you'd expect. Abort immediately drops you out of the install and reboots the system. Restart puts you back at the begining of the install; any choices you've made are lost. Continue returns you to where you were.

Neither FreeBSD's fdisk or disklabel write any changes to the disk until you have selected a distribution to install, such as Developer or User and begun to install the software. Unlike choices in Linux's fdisk or either OpenBSD's fdisk or disklabel, all of which require pressing enter to activate a selection after an option key has been pressed, FreeBSD's disk partitioning tools use hot keys. As soon as you press a key the corresponding action is taken.

Though the use of "OK" and "Cancel" is sometimes confusing in the FreeBSD install, it's hard to get much simpler or reliable than FreeBSD's fdisk and disklabel programs. When you enter fdisk, if you're starting with a clean disk there is a single highlighted line indicating the total free space. Regardless of how the disk may already be partitioned, pressing 'a' immediately deletes any existing slices and creates a single FreeBSD slice occupying the entire hard disk. If slices are defined you can use the up and down arrows to highlight one. Pressing 'd' deletes that partition and makes this space available. If contiguous slices are deleted or a slice next to free space is deleted the free space is combined.

When any line describing free space is highlighted, pressing 'c' starts the dialog to create a slice. The number of available sectors is displayed, and if you press enter, all available space is used by the new slice. If the disk were empty, the slice would fill the disk. If the free space was between two existing slices, the new slice would fill the space between the existing slices.

You may reduce the size to make two or more slices from the available space. The prompt indicates that you may change the numbers from sectors to megabytes by entering a number followed by an 'm' but 'g' for gigabytes also works. After entering the slice size, you are prompted for type, defaulted to 165 which is a FreeBSD slice in decimal. FreeBSD accepts slice types only in decimal notation. Only the following are needed for OpenBSD and Linux: 166 = OpenBSD, 131 = Linux files, 130 = Linux swap, and 5 = extended. If you are starting a dual or multi boot install, you can and should use FreeBSD to allocate the slices for the others.

You can use 'z' to toggle the size display from the default sectors to kilobytes or megabytes.

When you've finished allocating slices, use 'q' to leave OpenBSD's fdisk. No changes will be made to the disk but your choices are saved in memory until they are needed. If you restart a FreeBSD install, you will need to repeat the hard disk partitioning.

Following fdisk is FreeBSD's boot manager prompt. The default is to install FreeBSD's boot manager. Options to install a standard MBR with no boot manager or to make no changes to the MBR are also provided. FreeBSD's boot manager is pretty decent. It will recognize Linux and OpenBSD primary partitions and create entries for them in its list of systems to boot. It does not recognize a Linux system installed entirely into an extended partition without a separate primary boot partition and it doesn't recognize a second FreeBSD system installed into the same slice as another as bootable. More specifically it appears to recognize the partition with a device name that ends in "a", such as ad0s1a, as bootable. There do not appear to be any configuration options that will allow it to boot more than one partition in a slice or boot a partition inside an extended partition. GRUB which was first developed as an extension of FreeBSD's boot loader, before it was rewritten, has these capabilities.

FreeBSD's boot manager works well when there are 2 to 4 FreeBSD systems, each installed into its own slice or 1 to 3 FreeBSD systems with one OpenBSD system. It will also work with a Linux system installed the "standard" way with the boot partition in a primary partition. In each of these cases, it will automatically be set up correctly, for those partitions that exist at the time it is installed. After the first use, the FreeBSD boot loader records which system was last booted and uses that as the default on the next boot. The first time it's used, whatever system is in the lowest numbered primary partition is the default. GRUB can also be configured to use the last loaded system as the default. See FreeBSD's "man boot0cfg" for instructions on configuring FreeBSD's boot loader.

If the system being installed with FreeBSD is already setup with GRUB, then you should change the default form installing FreeBSD's boot loader to "None" so as to make no changes to the MBR. If you'll be installing more than one FreeBSD and or OpenBSD system before Linux, then install the FreeBSD boot manager and replace it with GRUB when you install the first Linux system. A standard single system, FreeBSD install, would normally use a standard MBR without a boot loader.

After the boot manager prompt is disklabel. The FreeBSD disklabel program, shows only FreeBSD slices, ignoring slices set up for and the internal details of any other operating system install. The top of the screen will be one or more lines listing every FreeBSD slice in the system. Use the up and down arrows to highlight a slice. If a highlighted slice has free space , you can press 'c' and start a dialog that prompts you for the amount of space to allocate. Like slices, this defaults to sectors, but can be entered in megabytes or gigabytes. After providing the size you are prompted whether the partition should be a file system or swap partition. If you select the default file system, you are prompted to provide a mount point. If you don't enter a mount point no partition is created.

If you've made a mistake while creating a new partition, you can press the Escape key or select cancel at the next prompt to abandon the partition without creating it. If you do create a partition you don't want, just delete it. If you delete a new partition that you wanted, just recreated it.

If you accidentally delete a partition from a previous install, this can be undone, but not without some difficulty. Pressing 'u' to Undo in FreeBSD's disklabel will prompt you to confirm that you're "SURE you want to Undo everything". If you continue with undo, it will undo all your disklabel and fdisk changes and return you to fdisk as it was when you started the install program. You will need to repeat any slice changes you made, repeat your boot manager selection, and redo any disklabel changes that you might have made.

With FreeBSD 5.0 and 5.1 an new UFS2 file system has been introduced as the default file system. As Nov. 2003 Grub does not support and cannot start a FreeBSD system booting from a UFS2 partition. There are two or possibly three work arounds for this problem. The disklabel program for 5.1 allows allows the UFS type to be toggled by pressing the "1" or "2" key. These are not listed in the available options, but on any partition marked for a new filesystem, pressing 1 toggles it it to UFS1 which Grub can boot. Pressing 2 returns it to the default UFS2.

Using UFS1 will obviously sacrifice whatever benefits prompted the development of UFS2. This may not be significant on a test or experimental machine implied by a multiboot system. One approach is to create a small /boot partition as UFS1 with most of the system installed into one or more larger UFS2 partitions. This will obviously reduce the number of possible systems, if you are doing a many boot system, but otherwise is probably the best solution. Some of the posts archived at mail.gnu.org seem to suggest that some variation of the chainloader command will work with UFS2, but my limited experiments with this were not successful. I chose a single large UFS1 partition which worked fine.

On new partitions and those marked to be formated with the newfs flag, there is an obscure option available. This is the "toggle Softupdates" option. This is an option that on most file systems will increase speed quite significantly for some disk operations, while also improving disk integrity. This sounds like a contradiction but there is significant research ^{1 2 3} to support its validity. Softupdates are BSD systems' response to journaled file systems. See the bottom of the F1 help for more information. The help suggests that small "/" file systems should not use softupdates and explains why.

If a previous FreeBSD install created a swap partition, there is no need to create a new one. The install will recognize and automatically use the existing swap partition. Since we are discussing multi boot systems, the performance issues of a swap file that may be somewhat too small or not physically close to the current system should not be important. If you are building a system where arrangement of partitions for performance issues is a serious consideration, you shouldn't be doing this on multi boot systems and thus don't need to be reading this. Any system that's important enough to warrant performance tuning should not be part of a multi boot system.

FreeBSD allows up to seven partitions per slice. Like FreeBSD's fdisk, disklabel uses a 'X' instead of a valid partition name such as 'ad0s1a' if you create too many. If you do create an 'X' partition, you need to delete it because disklabel will let you continue. A system installed into disk partition with more than seven FreeBSD partitions will not complete the boot sequence. Instead it displays error messages and drops into single user mode. /etc/fstab will be created containing the mount points given disklabel, but for the 'X' devices, no valid devices to mount these file systems exist. You must edit /etc/fstab to remove the invalid file system entries before the boot sequence can complete. This is almost exactly like Linux's Disk Druid creating excess invalid partitions.

FreeBSD's disklabel will let you create a new device or partition in any FreeBSD slice that has physical room and one or more available partition letters. To install a new FreeBSD system, you must create a new '/' file system at a minimum. If you do this in a slice with an existing '/' partition the previous system will become inaccessible. You can normally tell that there is a previous '/' mounted in the current slice, if any existing partition name ends in an 'a'. If you're working on disk ad0 in the slice 2, i.e., ad0s2, and there is an ad0s2a partition in the left column, that is a previous system's '/' file system. If you create a new partition and mount '/' on it, the old system's root device will be renamed to another partition name if there are any available letters between 'b' and 'h' (except 'c').

If you make a note of this new letter you can adjust GRUB's configuration to point to this as a bootable system. Since the new system has replaced the previous one in GRUBs nomenclature, it will already be configured in GRUB. To successfully complete a boot of the old system, you will need to start the new system, mount the old system's root device and edit the file that was /etc/fstab on the old system. Simply change the 'a' in the old device name that '/' mounts on to the new name, and the old system will be bootable again, assuming you have not deleted the necessary pieces with fdisk or disklabel.

If there are no available letters when you make a new "/" system, then the old root partition name will become 'X'. If an 'X' partition is created and allowed to remain, the disk space it occupies will not be accessible to any FreeBSD system because there is no valid device which can be used to access it. It should be deleted and the space made available. This will of course destroy the previous system. If it had separate file systems for /home or other areas where you had data you wish to preserve, these can be mounted without initializing the file systems either via disklabel or manually after starting the new system.

In addition to creating new partitions from free space, disklabel will let you make use of existing partitions from previous FreeBSD installs. 'm' will let you specify a mount point. You can for example share a large /tmp partition between multiple systems. The 't', toggle newfs, will cause an existing partition to be initialized as if it were new. This effectively takes the partition from the previous system but unless the old system's /etc/fstab is cleared, the old system will try to mount a file system on the device initialized by the new install. If you toggle newfs by mistake, toggling again won't undo the change, but pressing 'm' then canceling will undo the newfs option; if you don't plan to mount a file system, you don't plan to use it.

You can also create large swap and /tmp partitions in a FreeBSD slice near the middle of the disk and share them among any and all FreeBSD systems on the drive. The install will automatically recognize and use any existing swap partition from a previous FreeBSD install. To use the shared /tmp you might recognize it by its size or simply make a note of the partition name when it's created. After the first system is up an running, mount or df will display the /tmp device name. After creating a shared /tmp in the first installed FreeBSD system, you can use disklabel's 'm' option to mount the existing partition in the new system.

Four independent FreeBSD installs on the same disk is simple and I've created multiple quad boot systems including two FreeBSD systems.

With assistance from GRUB, the maximum number of bootable FreeBSD systems on a single disk is the number of FreeBSD partitions that can be created by fdisk and disklabel (28) less one for a swap partition or 27. It's clear that on a 30GB drive you could allocate one 1GB swap partition, then install 7 separate, 1GB, single '/' file system systems in each slice except the one with the swap partition which is limited to 6.

FreeBSD's boot loader might not be able to load these, but GRUB can. It's just a matter of specifying a - h (less c) as the BSD disklabel subpartition in grub.conf. To prevent disklabel from dynamically renaming devices when a new "/" is mounted, assign all the devices when the first system in the slice is created. Start with '/' then continue with "/two" up to "/seven" if this slice doesn't have the swap partition.

On subsequent installs, highlight the non swap partitions, toggle newfs, and assign the mount point as '/'. Depending on how many systems like this you are planning, and how soon you will create them, you may if it seems efficient, create all the GRUB entries at the same time because you will know in advance what device letters you will be using. If perhaps you created /home, /usr/local, or /tmp file systems that you will be sharing between systems, the devices these are mounted on would not be entered into GRUB because they will never be bootable. You would also avoid the newfs toggle to preserve existing data on such partitions.

Do not simply mount '/' on an existing partition without toggling the newfs flag. The install will fail because without the newfs flag, the devices won't exist and will not be created. Device creation is part of the newfs processing if a '/' file system will be mounted.

Once you've created all the partitions and assigned mount points for your new FreeBSD system, 'q' will take you to the next step of the FreeBSD install which is the distribution selection. Except for perhaps time setup, the remainder of a multi boot install is like any other FreeBSD install.

If you are installing FreeBSD in a system with OpenBSD, when you set the time, tell it the system (CMOS) clock is using UTC time. OpenBSD insists on this, and if you don't set this in FreeBSD, the FreeBSD and OpenBSD will display different local times, unless your time zone happens to be GMT.

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