Contents of AUTO file on itanium and pa-risc servers

[Saghar]

HI !

please clarify the following,

admin guide
HP-UX 11i Version 3
HP-UX System Administrator's Guide:
Logical Volume Management
HP 9000 and HP Integrity Systems
HP Part Number: 5991-6481

In the section where is describes mirroring boot disk on Integrity servers says

mkboot -a "hpux" /dev/rdisk/disk2

while some other notes says

mkboot -a "boot vmunix" /dev/dsk/c2t1d0

whts the difference betweent the two ?

Can anyone provide about detials /doc about AUTO file ? boot sequence ?

Is there any difference in contents of AUTO file on pa-risc and itanium server

thanks

[whiteknight]

Saghar,

11iv3 has changed from legacy to Agile view.

http://docs.hp.com/en/LVMmigration1/LVM_Migration_to_Agile.pdf


WK

[Saghar]

thanks, actually i want to clarify contents of AUTO file weather "hpux" or "boot vmunix" and whats the difference between these two

Ayaz

[Matti_Kurkela]

I think the suggestion to use 'mkboot -a "hpux"...' on Itanium is an error. The writer of the document has obviously been thinking mainly of PA-RISC, and failed to highlight this difference between PA-RISC and Itanium.

To find general information about HP-UX boot sequence (both Itanium and PA-RISC), see "man boot".

On PA-RISC, the firmware (known as PDC) first loads the ISL boot loader. ISL then reads the AUTO file to find out what it should do.

ISL alone is not sufficient to load a HP-UX kernel, so ISL must be instructed to load another component named "hpux". This "hpux" component can then find a bootable kernel.
If the AUTO file contains any boot options, ISL simply passes the boot options to "hpux" which can act on some of them and pass the rest on to the kernel.

See "man hpux" for more information of the "hpux" component and the possible contents of the AUTO file on PA-RISC.

On Itanium, the firmware contains the EFI boot manager. You can use it to start any EFI application, but by default it starts hpux.efi. The settings for the EFI boot manager are stored in the NVRAM, so there is no need to use a file at this point. However, the HP-UX specific boot options cannot be stored in NVRAM: everything in there is for EFI's internal use only.

When hpux.efi starts, it reads the AUTO file to find out the HP-UX-specific boot options (if any) and the name of the kernel file. See "man hpux.efi" to find more information about the AUTO file on Itanium.

MK