plan9fox/sys/man/8/9boot

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.TH 9BOOT 8
.SH NAME
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9bootfat, 9bootiso, 9bootpxe \- PC bootloader for FAT, ISO and PXE network booting
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.SH SYNOPSIS
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started by PC BIOS or chainloaded by partition bootsector
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.SH DESCRIPTION
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9boot is the bootloader used on PCs to start the Plan 9 kernel.
Its task is to read and parse the
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.IR plan9.ini (8)
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configuration file, gather some basic system information like
the amount of usable system memory, do some low level system
initialization and load the kernel from the boot media into memory.
After reading the configuration, the loader will automatically
attempt to boot the kernel that was specified by the
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.B bootfile=
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parameter. If there is no such parameter, a key
gets pressed on the keyboard or the kernel file was not
found then the loader enters the interactive
boot console.
The syntax of the boot console is the same as in
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the
.IR plan9.ini (8)
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file.
.BR
The word
.B clear [
.I prefix
]
can be used to remove parameters from the current configuration.
If a
.IR prefix
is specified, the first parameter that matches the prefix
is removed. If the
.IR prefix
argument is omited, the whole configuration will be reset.
.BR
The word
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.B boot
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will end the console and resume booting the kernel.
There are many ways to boot a PC so
.IR 9boot
was split into a number of distinct programs one for each boot
method.
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.SH FAT BOOTING
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When booting Plan 9 from a harddisk or USB pen drive, a
FAT16/32 partition (
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.IR 9fat
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) is used to store the kernel and
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.IR plan9.ini (8)
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configuration. Due to size limitations, instead of loading
the kernel directly, the bootsector (
.IR pbs
) of the FAT partition loads
a 2nd stage bootloader
.IR 9bootfat
from the root directory of the filesystem.
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.SH CD-ROM BOOTING
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Booting from CD-ROM requires only
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.IR 9bootiso
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to be included in the ISO-9660 image under
.B 386/9bootiso,
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set as a non emulation bootblock (see
.IR mk9660 (8)).
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Boot parameters are read from
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.B cfg/plan9.ini.
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.SH NETWORK BOOTING
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With a PXE capable BIOS and network card one can download
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.IR 9bootpxe
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and boot the kernel from a TFTP server (see
.IR dhcpd (8),
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.IR ndb (6)
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for details). Once started,
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.IR 9bootpxe
will read the file
.B /cfg/pxe/$ether
from the tftp server, where
.B $ether
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is the MAC address of the client's network card
in lower case hex, and use this as its
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.IR plan9.ini (8)
file.
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.SH FILES
.TP
.B /386/pbs
.TP
.B /386/9bootfat
.TP
.B /386/9bootiso
.TP
.B /386/9bootpxe
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.SH SOURCE
.BR /sys/src/boot/pc .
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.SH "SEE ALSO"
.IR plan9.ini (8)