What can I do during the Solaris/x86 booting sequence?

What can I do during the Solaris/x86 booting sequence?

Step #1: Boot loader


If you have multiple partitions, the boot loader in the Solaris
partition will come up and ask you which partition you want to boot.
This partition must be the active partition, or at least be marked
active by a third-party boot manager before this boot loader receives
control (not all boot managers have this feature). If you don't
answer in so many seconds, it boots Solaris.


This boot manager is pretty basic. It has no customization. You
can't change the default boot partition to one other than Solaris, you
can't change the timeout value, and you can't change the partition
descriptions. But it gets the job done.


Step #2: Device Configuration Assistant (DCA)


This will ask you to press ESC if you want to change stuff. This is to
make up for the fact that x86 machines don't have a nice OpenBOOT chip
to sort out REAL "Plug and Play".


Basically, in Solaris x86, the Device Assistant seems to set up
certain things in /boot/solaris. This is so the "real" OS has
some common format to examine for devices, instead of having lots of
nasty x86 hardware specific stuff. That way, Sun can keep the main OS
somewhat hardware independent, and keep it very close to the Sparc
version.


The "Assistant" can actually been of assistance. If you select
"partial scan", then "Device tasks", and then "View/Edit Devices", it
will tell you what Solaris THINKS your devices are, and where they are
at. Quite useful, when Solaris gets completely lost, and you're
wondering if it's your fault, or what.


Otherwise, it can give you a warm fuzzy feeling, if you select "Full
Scan", and you see all your devices properly recognized.


Step #3: OS Boot


Well, actually, the "Boot Assistant". The interface is similar,
but not identical, to SPARC Solaris' OpenBoot 'boot' command.
The main differences I notice are:



  • It's "b -r", not "boot -r", if you want to force reconfiguration.
    Why would you want to do that? Well sometimes, if your devices have
    changed a LITTLE, you might want to do this. You can also invoke it
    with a "touch /reconfigure" as root before rebooting.


  • You don't have nice device aliases like you do with Sparc hardware.
    That being said, if you do nothing, it should autoboot into the actual
    OS in a few seconds. Or you can type something quickly within 5
    seconds, and force a "reconfiguration boot", as mentioned earlier.


  • The "Driver Assistant" or whatever, really looks for major changes,
    like adding or removing a card. However, if, say, you add another disk
    drive, you'll probably want to just do "b -r". Note that the Device
    Assistant will itself trigger a "b -r", after it has autodetected
    hardware changes.


Step #4: The Main OS: Solaris


You made it (I hope)!. Hopefully, you should now see a line with
"SunOS5.8" or similar in it, and a little twirly text character
spinner starting. You are now really in the classic Solaris
environment. From here on in, your experience is almost identical to
your brethren who work with SPARC Sun equipment.


To learn more about the the Solaris boot process, read the boot(1M)
man page.


[Thanks to Phil at http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/]



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