> Eventually, I realized that FreeBSD's mount command didn't really understand my ZFS root filesystem. I couldn't find this direct quote in your link. But I'm

> Eventually, I realized that FreeBSD's mount command didn't really understand my ZFS root filesystem. I couldn't find this direct quote in your link. But I'm using FreeBSD with ZFS on a few machines and I don't understand this comment. You can absolutely boot with ZFS on root. The installer lets you do it out of the box. Including with geli for encryption. And you can use mount(8) to mount a ZFS partition, I have done that all the time when booting from recovery media and mounting my root pool. This gets a little confusing at first because most uses of mount(8) require a device name, and mounting ZFS takes a pool name, so you may have to zpool import first, but once you get over that it's fine.