Hello everyone.

I have one question to OBP's Boot option.

OK boot -sw

boot option '-s' is single mode option and '-r' is reconfigure option.

But I don't understand '-w' option.

what is the '-w' option?

I will wating for your answer... Thank you.

kalsae

±è½Å¹ü wrote:

> Hello everyone.
>
> I have one question to OBP's Boot option.
>
> OK boot -sw
>
> boot option '-s' is single mode option and '-r' is reconfigure option.
>
> But I don't understand '-w' option.
>
> what is the '-w' option?
>
> I will wating for your answer... Thank you.
>
> kalsae
>
>
Are you sure you don't mean 'v?'

CJT wrote:
> ±è½Å¹ü wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone.
>>
>> I have one question to OBP's Boot option.
>>
>> OK boot -sw
>>
>> boot option '-s' is single mode option and '-r' is reconfigure option.

And -a is "ask" (ask for where configuration files live) and -v is
"verbose" and -b is undocumented and means "don't run any startup scripts".

>>
>> But I don't understand '-w' option.
>>
>> what is the '-w' option?
>>
>> I will wating for your answer... Thank you.
>>
>> kalsae
>>
>>
> Are you sure you don't mean 'v?'
>

Nope, Kalsae means 'w'. Some documentation states that when booting
from a CDROM with the intention of mounting the hard disk (for instance
to edit /etc/shadow) you use the options -sw where s means single user
and w means "make the root directory writable". IME the -w option
doesn't make any difference at all, is completely pointless and merely
serves to confuse people. I suspect that this was necessary on some
long-ago version of SunOS and the habit has persisted (along with such
outmoded or plain wrong beliefs as "you need twice as much swap space as
RAM" and "cron re-reads its crontab file if you send a HUP to it").

It doesn't appear on the kernel(1M) manpage as a boot option (kernel(1M)
interprets the arguments given to "boot") which isn't a problem - both
the kernel booter and init (to which such arguments are ultimately
passed) simply ignore arguments they don't understand.

Bottom line, Kalsae? Eitehr specify or don't specify the -w option; it
makes no difference at all.

(This is IME - if anyone can point to a situation where it makes any
difference at all I'd be interested to hear it).

--
Tony

Tony Walton <tony.walton@s-u-n.com> wrote:
> Nope, Kalsae means 'w'. Some documentation states that when booting
> from a CDROM with the intention of mounting the hard disk (for instance
> to edit /etc/shadow) you use the options -sw where s means single user
> and w means "make the root directory writable". IME the -w option
> doesn't make any difference at all, is completely pointless and merely
> serves to confuse people. I suspect that this was necessary on some
> long-ago version of SunOS and the habit has persisted (along with such

This is exactly the case. Many years ago (SunOS 4 days) booting into
single-user mode would leave the root filesystem mounted in read-only,
so you would have to remount it read-write. Adding -w to the boot
flags would have the OS mount the root partition read-write before
dropping into single user mode.

Just to confuse things further, there is currently a "w" option
which you can pass to suninstall when booting from a CD/network which
means not to start X-windows. In this case there is a space between
the - and the w. ie :
boot net - install w

Which will start an install using text mode rather then X.

Scott.