New and Modified Hard Partition Commands

New Commands

Below are brief descriptions of the seven new commands used to manage an nPartition server complex:

Modified Commands

The commands shutdown and reboot have been modified for systems that support hard partitions. Two new options, -R and -H, have been added to both these commands.

The -R option is used to shut down the system to a “ready to reconfig” state and reboot automatically. The -R -H option is used to shut down the system to a “ready to reconfig” state but without rebooting. A partition must be put into the “ready to reconfig” state before its newly assigned cells can be activated. (A normal reboot will not activate newly assigned cells.) The “ready to config” state is also necessary to complete the removal of active cells that have been unassigned from the partition. The commands’ default behaviors, or the behaviors of all the other existing options, remain unchanged.

The interpretation of Autoboot and Autosearch in the command setboot has changed for systems that support hard partitions. The firmware interprets the bits in combination and not individually as done before.

In order to approximate the traditional behavior of setboot, the user input for the Autoboot and Autosearch flags is internally mapped to the right combination to achieve the desired behavior. This mapping should be transparent to the user of setboot, but it might not be so apparent to those accessing the firmware using other means. For the primary path, the boot action corresponds to the Autoboot and Autosearch flags in the following manner:

Additionally, systems with hard partitions support a boot action for each path. However, boot actions for paths other than the primary path cannot be set using setboot. (In this case, the default boot action for boot paths on nPartitions is “skip this device and try next path,” [a path flag value of 2.]) Instead, setting both the Autosearch and Autoboot flags to “on” (setboot -b on -s on) means that if the PRI path fails to boot, then booting the HAA boot path will not be attempted unless the HAA path flag is set to a non-default value (such as 1 or 2, which attempt booting HAA).

In the default case (when the HAA boot path is not set to “boot from the path”), specifying setboot -b on -s on will not cause an alternate path to be automatically booted when the primary path fails. Instead the user will be prompted.

Documentation Changes

Eight new manpages document the syntax and usage of the new commands. The reboot(1M) and shutdown(1M) manpages have been updated to document the -R and -H options, and the setboot(1M) manpage has been updated as well.