Solaris™ 8 System Administrator Exam Cram™ 2 (Exams CX-310-011 and CX-310-012)

The Boot Process

The boot PROM stores firmware that is responsible for booting the operating system. Because the SPARC boot process is somewhat different from the Intel x86 boot process, they are covered separately here.

The SPARC Boot Process

The SPARC boot process consists of the following phases:

1. Boot PROM— This phase displays system information and then runs the POST diagnostics. After the diagnostics are complete, the primary boot program, bootblk, is loaded. Its function is to locate the secondary boot program, ufsboot, on the boot device.

2. Boot Programs— In this phase, bootblk loads the ufsboot program into memory and executes it.

3. Kernel Initialization— In this phase, the ufsboot program loads the core kernel into memory and causes it ...