5.1. Synopsis

FreeBSD uses a three-stage bootstrap by default, which basically entails three programs which call each other in order (two boot blocks, and the loader). Each of these three build on the previous program's understanding and provide increasing amounts of sophistication.

The kernel is then started, which will then probe for devices and initialize them for use. Once the kernel boot process is finished, the kernel passes control to the user process init(8), which then makes sure the disks are in a usable state. init(8) then starts the user-level resource configuration which then mounts filesystems, sets up network cards to act on the network, and generally starts all the processes that usually are run on a FreeBSD system at startup.