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System starts

When powered on, after a panic, or if the system is rebooted via reboot(8) or shutdown(8), the PROM will proceed to its initialization, and will boot an operating system if autoboot is enabled.

Boot process description

The sparc64 boot process is split into two parts: a small first-stage bootblock that is written into the superblock area of a partition (and hence is limited in size to SBSIZE - DEV_BSIZE bytes), and a second-stage boot program that resides in the filesystem proper. The first-stage bootblock is loaded into memory by the PROM. After it receives control, it loads the second-stage boot program ofwboot from the filesystem. The second-stage boot program uses the device driver interface to the PROM and the stand-alone filesystem code in libsa.a to locate and load the kernel. The first-stage bootblock and second-stage boot program can be found in /usr/mdec/bootblk and /usr/mdec/ofwboot respectively. The second-stage boot program commonly resides in the root directory as /ofwboot.

The boot program attempts to load the kernel from the selected boot device, which must currently be an SCSI (sd) or IDE (wd) disk drive, or a CD-ROM (cd), or an SCSI tape drive (st).

The UltraSPARC Open Firmware will normally look for a bootloader on the device specified by the boot-device variable. The OpenBSD bootloader will then look for a kernel named bsd by default, unless the boot-file variable contains a filename, or a different filename has been specified in the boot command. To reset this variable to its default, empty, value, type the following:

Autoboot is enabled by setting the auto-boot? variable to “true”, and is the factory default.

Boot process options

The following options are recognized:

Accessing the PROM during runtime

If the sysctl(8) variable ddb.console is enabled, at any time you can break back to the ROM by pressing the ‘L1’ (also known as the “stop key”) and ‘a’ keys at the same time (if the console is a serial port the same is achieved by sending a “break”), and entering machine prom at the prompt. If you do this accidentally you can continue whatever was in progress by typing go at the PROM prompt, and then cont to return to the system.