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 basic 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
32 can be used to remove parameters from the current configuration.
35 is specified, the first parameter that matches the prefix
38 argument is omitted, the whole configuration will be reset.
41 appears in the configuration then
43 will return to the console prompt after processing the file.
47 will end the console and resume booting the kernel.
49 There are many ways to boot a PC so
51 was split into a number of distinct programs one for each boot
54 When booting Plan 9 from a harddisk or USB pen drive, a
57 is used to store the kernel and
59 configuration. Due to size limitations, instead of loading
60 the kernel directly, the bootsector
62 of the FAT partition loads
63 a 2nd stage bootloader
65 from the root directory of the filesystem.
67 Booting from CD-ROM requires only the
69 bootloader to be included in the ISO-9660 image under
71 set as a non-emulation bootblock (see
73 Boot parameters are read from
76 With a PXE capable BIOS and network card one can download
78 and boot the kernel from a TFTP server (see
82 for details). Once started,
86 from the tftp server, where
88 is the MAC address of the client's network card
89 in lower case hex, and use this as its