BOOT(8)

NAME
boot - system bootstrapping procedures

SYNOPSIS
boot [-n] [-q] [-d] [ -- <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.

The [-s] flag to the boot loader will being the system up in single-user mode. The [-a] flag instructs the system to prompt for the location of the root filesystem and the primary swap partition. The [-d] flag to the boot loader will bring the system up in debug mode. Here it waits for a kernel debugger connect; see gdb(8). Any extra flags or arguments, the after the -- separator, <boot string> 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 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 continue whatever was in progress by typing `go'.

FILES
/netbsd
    system code
/boot
    system bootstrap

SEE ALSO
crash(8), disklabel(8), fsck(8), halt(8), init(8), rc(8), shutdown(8), syslogd(8), installboot(8).