Stephen Day wrote: > PA-RISC machines have a modular approach to just about everything and booting > is no exception. When you switch the things on you get the PDC layer, This > does all sorts of checks ( loads of them on faster machines ). This will then > load the IPL ( Inital Program Loader ) this is also known as the ISL ( Inital > System Loader )
ISL (aka mongoose) is the *secondary* loader. It uses IODC (and some PDC calls) to load HPUX (or whatever). PDC/IODC is the primary loader. > As far as I know there is no differance between the two. You > can interact with the IPL if you want to when loading HP-UX and I think MPE. > It can be useful at times. The IPL layer then loads the secondary boot loader This is wrong. ISL loads the OS and passes parameters to it. (eg "hpux -is" to load hpux and run single user state.) > . > This depends on your operating system. If you run HP-UX then it's called > ( strangely enough ) hpux. This does the loading of the kernel. AFIAK, hpux is an ISL built-in. The "HPUX" seen when doing lifls of an HPUX boot disk, is just the LIF partition name. > I'm guessing at this stage but it looks very much like PALO replaces the IPL > layer and does the kernel loading itself. Correct. > This is cheating from HP's point of view but nevermind, it does work. > The PDC layer will think whatever PALO > installed is an IPL and will have a go at loading it. AFAIK, that's the intended design. (Some other things are "cheated" but they've been discussed before) > I have seen that init=-7 message a few times whilst installing HP-UX. > I think it means it can't find a lif image and is normaly followed by 6 or 7 > lines of numbers. It's an error returned by IODC when loading palo. The error can be decoded from the PA IO Arch ERS. Available from both the www.parisc-linux.org and docs.hp.com web sites. grant
