NAME
boot,
ofwboot —
system bootstrapping procedures
SYNOPSIS
boot |
[-adqsv]
[-- ⟨boot
string⟩] |
DESCRIPTION
Sun UltraSPARC systems support booting from locally attached storage media (e.g.
hard disk, CD-ROM), and booting over Ethernet networks using BOOTP.
Power fail and crash
recovery
Normally, the system will reboot itself at power-up or after crashes. An
automatic consistency check of the file systems will be performed as described
in
fsck(8), and unless this
fails, the system will resume multi-user operations.
Cold starts
The Sun Open Firmware performs a Power On Self Test (POST), and then will boot
an operating system according to configuration in Open Firmware environment
variables.
Boot program options
-
-
- -a
- Prompt for the root file system device, the system crash
dump device, and the path to
init(8).
-
-
- -d
- Bring the system up in debug mode. Here it waits for a
kernel debugger connect; see
gdb(1).
-
-
- -q
- Boot the system in quiet mode.
-
-
- -s
- Bring the system up in single-user mode.
-
-
- -v
- Boot the system in verbose mode.
Any extra flags or arguments, or the ⟨
boot
string⟩ after the -- separator are passed to the boot PROM. Other
flags are currently ignored.
At any time you can halt the running system and get back to the Open Firmware.
If the console is the Sun framebuffer and keyboard, press the
‘STOP’ and ‘A’ keys at the same time on the keyboard.
On older models of Sun keyboards, the ‘STOP’ key is labeled
‘L1’.
If the console is a serial port the same is achieved by sending a
‘BREAK’.
If you do this accidentally, you can continue whatever was in progress with the
go command.
BOOT DEVICES
Since machines vary greatly in the way their devices are connected, there are
aliases defined by the firmware. You can either use the fully qualified Open
Firmware path of a device node, or the alias.
The secondary boot loader,
ofwboot, takes
boot commands virtually the same as Open Firmware. Thus, the
following examples apply equally to
ofwboot as well as Open
Firmware.
A typical list of usable boot devices (extracted from the output of the Open
Firmware command
devalias) is:
net /sbus/SUNW,hme@e,8c00000
disk /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@0,0
cdrom /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@6,0:f
disk6 /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@6,0
disk5 /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@5,0
disk4 /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@4,0
disk3 /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@3,0
disk2 /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@2,0
disk1 /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@1,0
disk0 /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@0,0
If a device specification includes a partition letter (for example
cdrom in above list), that partition is used by default,
otherwise the first (a) partition is used. If booting from the net device,
there is no partition involved.
The boot device is an optional first part of the boot string, if no device is
specified the default device is used (see below).
FIRMWARE ENVIRONMENT
VARIABLES
All Open Firmware environment variables can be printed with the
printenv command and changed with the
setenv command. The boot process relevant variables and
their suggested value for booting
NetBSD are:
boot-command boot
auto-boot? true
boot-file
boot-device disk
diag-switch? false
Of course you may select any other boot device, if you do not want to boot from
the device aliased to
disk, see the discussion on devices
above.
FILES
- /netbsd
- system code
- /ofwboot
- system bootstrap
- /usr/mdec/ofwboot.net
- alternate bootstrap when booting from the network, see
diskless(8) for
details.
EXAMPLES
Boot from CD-ROM:
Note that some multi-architecture CDs are not able to use the default sparc64
partition for CD-ROMs (f), so they may require an explicit partition letter,
for example
When using external SCSI CD-ROM drives it is important to know two things: the
Sun firmware expects the SCSI ID to be six, and the drive must support
512-byte block reads, in addition to the standard 2048-byte reads.
Use
to boot single user from network and break into the kernel debugger as soon as
possible.
Use
to boot a kernel named netbsd obtained via tftp and have it ask for root file
system, swap partition and init location once it is up.
During installation from a different operating system
is used to boot a “miniroot” file system from the swap partition.
SEE ALSO
disklabel(8),
diskless(8),
fsck(8),
halt(8),
init(8),
installboot(8),
rc(8),
shutdown(8),
sparc/boot(8),
syslogd(8)
STANDARDS
Sun developed its firmware and promoted it to become
IEEE Std
1275-1994 (“Open Firmware”).
IEEE 1275 Open
Firmware
BUGS
NetBSD provides no way to boot UltraSPARC systems from
floppy disks. This is unlikely to change, due to very low demand for this
feature.
The OBP on Ultra 1 and Ultra 2 machines can only boot from the first 4Gb of the
disk.