New and Modified Superdome Commands (new)

New Commands

Brief descriptions of the seven new commands which are used to manage a Superdome complex are given below:

Modified Commands

The commands shutdown and reboot have been modified to support Superdome platforms. 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 -H option is used to shut down the system to a "ready to reconfig" state but without rebooting. The "ready to reconfig" state is the state that a partition must be put into before new cells that have been assigned to the partition can be active or to complete the removal of cells that have been unassigned from the partition. (A normal reboot will not activate newly assigned cells.) See Managing Superdome Complexes: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators, part no, B2355-90702 for more information. The default behavior or the behavior of all the other existing options remain unchanged.

The interpretation of Autoboot and Autosearch in the command setboot has changed for systems that support hardware 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 might show up when accessing the firmware using means other than setboot. For the primary path, the boot action corresponds to the Autoboot and Autosearch flags in the following manner:

Additionally, systems with hardware partitions support a boot action for each path. However, the boot action for the paths other than the primary path cannot be set using setboot. Instead, these must be set through the Boot Console Handler using the pf command. The default boot action for the hardware partitions is to "skip this device and try next path." The case where both the Autosearch and Autoboot flags are “on” will not work as expected until the path flags for the alternate paths are set appropriately through the BCH. In the default case, 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.

A new field called the Root Cell Numberhas been added to the bootpath in setboot, to support this command on the Superdome platform. The bootpath displayed by setboot now includes Root Cell Numberon Superdome platform. To set the bootpath using setboot, the user needs to include Root Cell Numberin the bootpath.

Documentation Changes

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