The system disk from which HP-UX boots has a boot area and a root partition. It may also have swap space and other file systems. The boot area contains a bootstrap loader and necessary information that is used at boot time. ISL is also a part of the boot area. The files in this area are in logical interchange format (LIF). Important parts of the boot area are:
an LIF volume header that identifies the LIF volume
a file containing an HP-UX volume name
a directory that contains a list of files contained in this area
ISL
secondary loader utility ( hpux )
a file with name AUTO
After PDC has finished its job, the ISL is loaded into memory from the boot device selected by PDC. Now the ISL takes control of the boot process and accesses the AUTO file. The AUTO file contains the hpux utility name and any arguments to be passed to the hpux utility. The ISL loads hpux into memory and provides all arguments to hpux . After starting execution, the hpux utility uses these arguments to find the location and file name for the HP-UX kernel. By default, the kernel is present in the /stand directory and has the name vmunix . The hpux loads the kernel into memory and hands control over to the kernel.
HP-UX has some commands to display the LIF area contents. The lifls command takes a character disk device file as its argument and lists the files in its LIF area. The lifcp command can be used to show the contents of the AUTO file. The following command lists the LIF area in long format on disk c0t6d0 .
# lifls -l /dev/dsk/c0t6d0 volume ISL10 data size 7984 directory size 8 99/04/22 03:47:46 filename type start size implement created =============================================================== HPUX -12928 584 800 0 99/04/22 03:47:47 ISL -12800 1384 240 0 97/11/06 02:10:13 AUTO -12289 1624 1 0 97/11/06 02:10:13 PAD -12290 1632 1700 0 97/11/06 02:10:14 LABEL BIN 3336 8 0 99/11/24 15:36:41 #
The mkboot and rmboot commands are used to install, modify, or delete files in the LIF area.
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