Booting process in Solaris

Booting process in Solaris can be divided in to different phases for ease of study . First phase starts at the time of switching on the machine and is boot prom level , it displays a identification banner mentioning machine host id serial no , architecture type memory and Ethernet address This is followed by the self test of various systems in the machine.

This process ultimately looks for the default boot device and reads the boot program from the boot block which is located on the 1-15 blocks of boot device. The boot block contains the ufs file system reader which is required by the next boot processes.

The ufs file system reader opens the boot device and loads the secondary boot program from /usr/platform/`uname –i`/ufsboot ( uname –i expands to system architecture type)

The boot program above loads a platform specific kernel along with a generic solaris kernel

The kernel initialize itself and load modules which are required to mount the root partition for continuing the booting process.