Modifying Your Generic Kernel

Introduction link

For those coming from the Linux world, they’ll find that this is super simple on BSD. In my case, I have a multicore server, and after installing BSD, it only detects one core. It’s a shame to run with just one core when you have several. I’ll explain here the procedure to switch to multicore, but this works with other kernel modifications as well!

Single Core to Multicore link

During installation, you need to select the “bsd.mp” kernel. When the machine reboots after installation, it boots on the single-core kernel. We will therefore move the current kernel and replace it with the multicore one. To do this, it’s very simple:

  mv /bsd /bsd.mono
  

Here we moved the old kernel to bsd.mono (for single processor) and now we’ll rename the multiprocessor kernel to the default kernel name (because /bsd is the default kernel):

  mv /bsd.mp /bsd
  

Now all you have to do is reboot. That wasn’t complicated, was it?

Booting on Another Kernel link

If you don’t want to boot with the default kernel, you can do this before the kernel loads:

  boot> b /bsd.mono
  

or

  boot> boot hd0a:/bsd.mono