| As covered in Chapter 3, booting with vPars is different from booting without vPars, in that booting with vPars is managed through the Virtual Partition Monitor (vpmon). You still boot an HP-UX kernel, just as you normally would without vPars, however; vpmon manages the Virtual Partitions that allow you to run multiple instances of HP-UX on the same computer. Every Virtual Partition has its own HP-UX 11i operating system running, including a unique kernel. You can customize the operating system and kernel in each Virtual Partition to suit your needs.  | In the examples earlier in this book, the vparcreate command specified a kernel of /stand/vmunix, which is the default kernel. It is likely that you will modify this kernel in some way(s) in order to optimize it for the applications you'll be running in each Virtual Partition. You may end up with radically different kernels for each of your Virtual Partitions, depending on the application(s) and specific requirements for each vPar. |
In Chapter 3, covering booting vPars, we covered and example of specifying a kernel path. Your default kernel in HP-UX is /stand/vmunix. You may perform experimentation with the kernels of the vPars on your system and have to boot these experimental kernels other than /stand/vmunix. The following example shows booting from a kernel called vmunix_test1 with the -b option to vparload: MON> vparload -p symbol1 -b /stand/vmunix_test1 The kernel path above is loaded with this vparload, but no permanent changes were made. To make a permanent change to the vPars database file to update the kernel path, you would issue the following command: # vparmodify -p symbol1 -b "stand/vmunix_test1" The vPar has now been modified to have a default kernel of /stand/vmunix_test1. We'll first cover the procedure used in Chapter 2 to perform Virtual Partition kernel-related work. Next we'll cover device drivers in general and an example of using a tape device and its device driver in a Virtual Partition. Later in this chapter, where background is provided on the HP-UX kernel, there is extensive coverage of modifying kernel parameters and a detailed description of HP-UX 11i kernel parameters. | 
