bootman is the Haiku and BeOS boot loader on x86 systems. It resides solely in the master boot record and does not require installing Haiku or BeOS, although it must be installed from Haiku or BeOS.
It is filesystem-agnostic, and boots an operating system as if it were being booted directly from the hardware. As such, it can boot virtually any operating system. It can also chainload GRUB, LILO and NTLDR. However, being independent of an OS prevents it being able to boot any disks which are not accessible via BIOS I/O routines (e.g. INT 13H), with the exception of BeOS disk-in-a-file images on FAT32, NTFS or ext2 file systems.
bootman appeared in BeOS R4.0, replacing LILO, which was used in R3.x. Installing, configuring and uninstalling can be done solely by a graphical application, also called bootman. This can also create an MBR restoration floppy disk without modifying the current MBR.
In Haiku Alpha3 bootman was rewritten and renamed to BootManager.