3 9bootfat, 9bootiso, 9bootpxe \- PC bootloader for FAT, ISO and PXE network booting
5 started by PC BIOS or chainloaded by partition bootsector
7 9boot is the bootloader used on PCs to start the Plan 9 kernel.
8 Its task is to read and parse the
10 configuration file, gather some basic system information like
11 the amount of usable system memory, do some low level system
12 initialization and load the kernel from the boot media into memory.
14 After reading the configuration, the loader will automatically
15 attempt to boot the kernel that was specified by the
17 parameter. If there is no such parameter, a key
18 gets pressed on the keyboard or the kernel file was not
19 found then the loader enters the interactive
22 The syntax of the boot console is the same as in
31 can be used to remove parameters from the current configuration.
34 is specified, the first parameter that matches the prefix
37 argument is omited, the whole configuration will be reset.
41 will end the console and resume booting the kernel.
43 There are many ways to boot a PC so
45 was split into a number of distinct programs one for each boot
48 When booting Plan 9 from a harddisk or USB pen drive, a
51 ) is used to store the kernel and
53 configuration. Due to size limitations, instead of loading
54 the kernel directly, the bootsector (
56 ) of the FAT partition loads
57 a 2nd stage bootloader
59 from the root directory of the filesystem.
61 Booting from CD-ROM requires only
63 to be included in the ISO-9660 image under
65 set as a non emulation bootblock (see
67 Boot parameters are read from
70 With a PXE capable BIOS and network card one can download
72 and boot the kernel from a TFTP server (see
75 for details). Once started,
79 from the tftp server, where
81 is the MAC address of the client's network card
82 in lower case hex, and use this as its
95 .BR /sys/src/boot/pc .