boot(8) - NetBSD Manual Pages

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BOOT(8)              NetBSD/sparc System Manager's Manual              BOOT(8)


NAME

     boot - system bootstrapping procedures


SYNOPSIS

     boot [-adqsv] [-- <boot string>]


DESCRIPTION

   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 NetBSD boot netbsd from partition a of the boot device, which must
     currently be an ``sd'' disk.

   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).

     -C   Boot kernel in compat mode.  Starting with revision 1.14 (introduced
          on 2003/03/01), the sparc boot program loads the NetBSD kernel at
          its linked virtual address.  This feature requires a kernel built
          after 2003/02/21 (corresponding to kernel version 1.6Q).  To load
          older kernels, the -C option must be used, which loads the kernel at
          physical address 0x4000.  The size of a kernel loaded in this way is
          limited to approximately 3MB.

     -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.

     The SPARC boot ROM comes in two flavours: an ``old-style'' ROM is used in
     sun4 machines, while a ``new-style'' ROM can be found on sun4c and sun4m
     models.  The ``new-style'' SPARC boot ROM is a full-featured Forth system
     with emacs key bindings.  It can be put in ``old-style'' user-interface
     compatibility mode (in which case it shows a simple `>' prompt), but this
     is essentially useless.  However, by default the ROM runs in old-mode; to
     enter new-mode type `n'.  The ROM then shows a Forth-style ``ok'' prompt.
     It is recommended to have the ROM always start in its native
     ``new-style'' mode.  Utter the following incantation in new-mode to force
     the ROM to always start in new-mode.

          ok setenv sunmon-compat? false

     The ROM will normally load the kernel from ``sd(0,0,0)vmunix''.  To
     change the default so that NetBSD will be loaded from somewhere else,
     type the following

          ok setenv boot-from sd(0,0,0)netbsd

     At any time you can break back to the ROM by pressing the `L1' and `a'
     keys at the same time (if the console is a serial port the same is
     achieved by sending a `break').  If you do this accidentally you can con-
     tinue whatever was in progress by typing `go'.


FILES

     /netbsd    system code
     /boot      system bootstrap


SEE ALSO

     disklabel(8), fsck(8), halt(8), init(8), installboot(8), rc(8),
     shutdown(8), syslogd(8)

NetBSD 2.1                      January 2, 2004                     NetBSD 2.1