Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Booting process in solaris 10

Booting process in solaris 10

The first question while giving any interview in solaris is what is the booting process in solaris or what is the boot phase in solaris.

Even to understand solaris clearly and to trouble shoot most of the things we need to know the booting process so that we can encounter where exactly is the problem we are getting.

The Boot Phases

The different phases of the boot process on SPARC-based systems are described here:

(I) Boot PROM phase.

The PROM displays the system identification information and then runs power-on self test (POST), which is a diagnostics routine that scans the system to verify the installed hardware and memory. POST runs diagnostics on hardware devices and builds a device tree, which is a data structure describing the devices attached to the system. After the completion of POST, the PROM loads the primary boot program bootblk.

(II) Boot programs phase.

The bootblk program loaded by PROM finds the secondary boot program ufsboot located in the UFS file system on the default boot device and loads it into the memory.

(III) Kernel initialization phase.

The ufsboot program loads the kernel into the memory. The kernel initializes itself and uses the ufsboot program to locate and load OS modules to control the system. A module is a piece of software with a specific functionality, such as interfacing with a particular hardware device. After loading enough modules to mount the root (/) file system, the kernel umnaps the ufsboot program and continues gaining control of the system. At the end of the kernel initialization phase, the kernel starts the /sbin/init process.

(IV) The init phase.

The init phase starts when, after initializing itself, the kernel starts the /sbin/init process, which in turn starts /lib/svc/bin/svc.startd to start the system services to do the following:

Check and mount file systems.

Configure network and devices.

Start various processes and perform tasks related to system maintenance.

The svc.startd process also executes run control (rc) scripts for backward compatibility. The steps in the boot process are illustrated in



Thanks
Naveen

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