Each disk (at least two, anyway) will need to have a boot partition that is not part of the ZFS pool to provide redundancy in the event of hardware failure.

In the instructions above it's creating an EFI boot partition as a kind of proactive measure against future changes (EFI boot partitions are FAT small-ish FAT fat file systems that chainload drivers, basically).

In any case, none of those first three partitions is going to belong to the zpool - just the the last (largest) one.

This HOWTO for ZFS on Root for FreeBSD explains it in more detail. (But the different commands may just make it more confusing...)

Consider the following:

• Your firmware (BIOS, EFI, whatever) knows nothing but how to find a boot
• There is nothing but JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks)

You can't boot ffrom ZFS because your firmwar doesn't know what ZFS is (same is true of what ever other filesystem is on mdadm as well). So there needs to be a non-ZFS partition the firmware can boot from, and since this won't be protected by ZFS reduncancy, it makes sense to have copies of it in many places.

Each disk (at least two, anyway) will need to have a boot partition that is not part of the ZFS pool to provide redundancy in the event of hardware failure.

In the instructions above it's creating an EFI boot partition as a kind of proactive measure against future changes (EFI boot partitions are FAT small-ish FAT fat file systems that chainload drivers, basically).

In any case, none of those first three partitions is going to belong to the zpool - just the the last (largest) one.

This HOWTO for ZFS on Root for FreeBSD explains it in more detail. (But the different commands may just make it more confusing...)

Consider the following:

• Your firmware (BIOS, EFI, whatever) knows nothing but how to find a boot
• There is nothing but JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks)

You can't boot from ZFS directly because your firmware doesn't know what ZFS is. So there needs to be a non-ZFS partition the firmware can boot from, and since this won't be protected by ZFS redundancy, it makes sense to have copies of it in many places.

Each disk (at least two, anyway) will need to have a boot partition that is not part of the ZFS pool to provide redundancy in the event of hardware failure.

In the instructions above it's creating an EFI boot partition as a kind of proactive measure against future changes (EFI boot partitions are FAT small-ish FAT fat file systems that chainload drivers, basically)

In any case, none of those first three partitions is going to belong to the zpool - just the the last (largest) one.

This HOWTO for ZFS on Root for FreeBSD explains it in more detail. (But the different commands may just make it more confusing...)

Each disk (at least two, anyway) will need to have a boot partition that is not part of the ZFS pool to provide redundancy in the event of hardware failure.

In the instructions above it's creating an EFI boot partition as a kind of proactive measure against future changes (EFI boot partitions are FAT small-ish FAT fat file systems that chainload drivers, basically).

In any case, none of those first three partitions is going to belong to the zpool - just the the last (largest) one.

This HOWTO for ZFS on Root for FreeBSD explains it in more detail. (But the different commands may just make it more confusing...)

Consider the following:

• Your firmware (BIOS, EFI, whatever) knows nothing but how to find a boot
• There is nothing but JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks)

You can't boot ffrom ZFS because your firmwar doesn't know what ZFS is (same is true of what ever other filesystem is on mdadm as well). So there needs to be a non-ZFS partition the firmware can boot from, and since this won't be protected by ZFS reduncancy, it makes sense to have copies of it in many places.