The FreeBSD Startup Process

When you first start FreeBSD, it prints a flurry of messages on your screen from the kernel and also from the various processes starting up. We won’t go into detail about what all these messages mean right now (a complete discussion of the FreeBSD startup procedure and how to control it can be found in Chapter 14, “System Configuration and Startup Scripts”), but the following sections give a quick rundown of what you will be seeing while you wait for the command prompt.

Note

The following sections apply only to FreeBSD running on x86 (Intel) hardware. Although the startup process on Alpha, SPARC, or other platforms is similar, some of the details are slightly different.

The Power-On Self Test (POST) and BIOS

The ...

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