Booting on X86 Systems
On X86 systems, the Solaris 11 boot model relies on the BIOS that ships with the target hardware. Instead of using a VTOC and boot block, X86 systems use the BIOS to call the Master Boot Record (MBR), a 512-byte construct that includes support for a partition table and bootstrap code. The MBR provides support for multibooting, a practice of putting multiple operating systems on a single disk. That capability on SPARC is moot.
The X86 counterpart to the OBP’s boot utility is the Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB), which we used in the last chapter. Like the OBP, several utilities are available within GRUB itself. If you press C before the system has a chance to boot, you’ll be dropped into a command-line environment with this ...
Get OCA Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-821) now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
