From: Nik.Tarasyuk@snowyhydro.com.au
Date: Tue Jul 30 2002 - 02:55:50 EDT
Hi Managers
A lot of thanks to Jim Belonis, James Sainsbury, Peter Reynolds, Zhiping Hu, Dr. Thomas Blinn,
Oisin McGuinness, William H. Magill.
I have copied osf_boot from another system,
and everything is OK now.
I am a bit puzzled by absence of ONLY osf_boot file on my backup,
but I won't let this fact to destroy my night sleep.
This explanation from Dr. Thomas Blinn gives an excellent insight into the "boot" world:
"The "osf_boot" program is the system's secondary bootstrap. When you
boot the system, the first program to run is a disk type specific and
file system specific bootstrap, the primary bootstrap, which is read
from the boot disk. (For network booting, the primary bootstrap is
the bootp and tftp code in the console firmware.) The primary disk
bootstrap is stored at a fixed, known location on the disk, and it
knows enough about the disk type and the root file system to find the
secondary bootstrap ("osf_boot"), read it into memory, and start it
running. (For a network bootstrap, the functional equivalent of the
"osf_boot" program is placed at the beginning of the network bootable
kernel image, and it's started once it's read into memory by the code
in the bootp/tftp part of the console firmware.) The secondary boot
("osf_boot") retrieves information from the console firmware, talks
to the human if it's an interactive boot, finds the bootable kernel
on disk, reads the kernel into memory, performs the needed steps to
make it runnable (the on-disk image doesn't have final resolution of
some of the addresses, they depend on where it gets loaded into the
real physical memory) and then eventually starts the kernel running.
I have no idea why it's not on your backup tapes, but you can restore
it from the distribution media. It should be installed during any
normal installation, and updated during an installupdate. You can
find the original size, checksum, etc. in the ".inv" files for the
OSFBASE subset, I suspect (I'd have to look to be sure).
In general, the "genvmunix" file distributed with the system will be
the same on every copy of the same version; it's just copied into
the root from the installation media. However, if you have installed
an NHD supplement, or patches, then you might have rebuild "genvmunix"
from the updated binaries, and it also might have been delivered in a
patch kit (if there was a defect in the original version), since it
is rebuilt as part of the patch kit build procedures. In general,
on systems running the same patch level, with the same NHD supplement
if one is installed, the "genvmunix" should be the same, but it may
not be if someone has rebuilt it from the distributed binaries, or
even if someone did a "touch" (to make it look different), or some
other such change."
-----Original Message-----
I couldn't locate any information about osf_boot file which is located in root directory,
neither in Tru64 documentation nor in the man pages.
I wonder if someone can point me into right direction or say a few words about
the above mentioned file, its role, time of creation, etc.
This file has misteriously disappeared from my backup tape,
and when I have restored the system and trying to boot I am getting
messages "Cannot open osf_boot".
Second question: Can I safely copy genvmunix from one system to another,
provided all of them are same 4.0F.
For some reason genvmunix is different on every systtm, different date, different size.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nik Tarasyuk
Software Engineer
Snowy hydro
Australia
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