BOOT_SPARC(8)       OpenBSD System Manager's Manual (SPARC)      BOOT_SPARC(8)

NAME
     boot - sparc-specific system bootstrapping procedures

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 de-
     scribed in fsck(8)), and unless this fails, the system will resume multi-
     user operations.

   Cold starts
     System boot blocks are installed near the start of the boot disk using
     the procedure described in installboot(8). The boot program attempts to
     load bsd from partition ``a'' of the boot device, which must currently be
     an ``sd'' disk.

     The -s flag to the bootloader will bring 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.  Other flags are current-
     ly 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 na-
     tive ``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)bsd''. To change
     the default so that OpenBSD will be loaded, type the following:

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

     If the sysctl(8) variable ddb.console is enabled, 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
     /bsd    system code
     /boot   system bootstrap

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

OpenBSD 2.9                     April 19, 1994                               1
