On Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:59:19 -0400 (EDT), David Dean wrote: > > We have gotten in to trouble twice now with zipl.conf. > We are on 10.3, upgrading to 10.4 then to 11.2. > We have removed DASD in the past - USER DIRECTORY - > and when we boot again without running zipl we get problems > with it trying to load the old DASD def. I do not have, > I recently discovered, an adequate knowledge of zipl - > working on that - but if anyone has directions to a good > explanation (I like flow charts.) > > Now the real question. A friend asked the question, > "why not run zipl at boot?" and I said "hmmmmmm". > > Good? Bad? Ugly?
One must distinguish between ZIPL (all caps), which is the boot loader itself, and zipl (lower case), which is a command that can be run at the Linux shell prompt. zipl writes out a fresh copy of ZIPL whenever it is run (several stages), plus the map file. Strictly speaking, ZIPL *always* gets run at boot, by definition. zipl should only be run when needed. It won't hurt anything to run it, but why run it if you don't need to? But getting to the root of the problem, whenever you delete a DASD device you need to re-build your initial RAM file system, then run zipl. Running zipl, by itself, is not enough. The list of DASD devices to be brought online is included in the initial RAM file system, and bringing the devices online, obviously, must occur before the permanent root file system is mounted. Of course, the same holds true for adding a DASD device. If you have multiple kernels installed, the initial RAM file system must be built separately for each kernel. -- .''`. Stephen Powell : :' : `. `'` `- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
