Since this article was written, many distros have moved away from inittab. See Unix and Linux startup scripts, Part 1.
"Booting the computer", this is a common word associated with starting the computer.
Though we use it casually in our daily life, have you ever thought of
what exactly it is ? or how the system brings itself to a workable
environment ? Well, my attempt in this article is to explain all the stages involved in booting your linux machine. In simple words, "bootstrapping" means starting up your computer. It involves all those stages, from the moment you power on your machine
till the system is ready to log you in.
The Boot process involves several different stages that the system undergoes while it is being booted. If any of these stages fail, then the system cannot start
itself.
* The BIOS
* Kernel Initialization
* Hardware Configuration
* System Processes
* Startup Scripts
* Multiuser Mode
Lets look at each of the above stages in detail.
This is the initial stage of the boot process. The moment you power your system, the microprocesser is not aware of your computer environment or even your operating system. It is the BIOS, that provides the necessary instructions to microprocessor and helps to initialize the computer environment. That is why it is called Basic Input/Output System.
These are the main tasks of BIOS.
* POST (Power On Self Test): The BIOS performs a power
on self test on all hardware components attached to the computer
during booting. You might have noticed the LEDs on your keyboard flashing
during booting. That is an example of POST. If anything fails, it will be
reported to you on your screen.
* The BIOS provides a set of low level routines for the
hardware components to interface with the Operating System.
These routines act like drivers for your Screen, Keyboard, Ports etc.
* The BIOS helps to manage the settings of hard disks,
your first boot device, system time and more.
The BIOS also initiates the bootstrapping sequence by loading the Initial
Program Loader (The boot loader program) into the computer memory. The
software is usually stored in the ROM. This stage is actually outside
of the domain of the Operating System and it is more vendor specific.
Linux actually implements a two stage boot process. In the first stage, the BIOS loads the boot program (Initial Program Loader) from the hard disk to the memory. In the second stage, the boot program loads the Operating System kernel vmlinuz into memory. Though we can name the kernel anything of your like, we'll call it vmlinuz. Well, it's just a tradition, where 'vm' stands for the Virtual Memory support and last 'z' denotes that it is a compressed image, ie vmlinux.z => vmlinuz.
When the kernel loads into memory, it performs a memory test.
Most of the kernel data structures are initialized statically. So it
sets aside a part of memory for kernel use. This part of the memory cannot be used by any other processes. It also reports the total amount of physical memory
available and sets aside those for the user processes.
Before explaining how startup scripts work, let's have a look at the
tasks performed by them. The following are the important tasks
performed by startup scripts.
* Set the name of the computer
* Set the time zone
* Check the hard disk with fsck
* Mount system disk
* Remove old files from /tmp partition
* Configure network interfaces with correct IP
address
* Startup deamons and other network services
The startup scripts are found in /etc/rc.d/init.d folder in your
linux machine.
You can boot your linux machine to different runlevels. A
runlevel is a software defined configuration of your system where the
system behaviour will vary in different runlevels. Though, linux can
have 10 different runlevels, only 7 of them are used. I have
mentioned them below.
runlevel | description |
0 |
shutdown |
1 or S |
single user mode |
2 | multiuser mode without nfs |
3 |
full multiuser mode |
4 |
not used |
5 |
X windows |
6 |
reboot |
You can specify the runlevel in the init configuration file /etc/inittab.
You may see folders (rc[0-7].d) corresponding to each runlevel in
the /etc folder. These folders contain files symbolically linked (in
linux everything is a file) to the startup scripts in folder
/etc/rc.d/init.d. If you look at these folders, you may see that the
name of the symbolic links starts with the letter "S" or "K" followed by a
number and the name of the startup script /service to which it is linked
to.
For example, the following are the files in runlevel 2 and 3.
/etc/rc2.d/K20nfs -> ../init.d/nfs
/etc/rc2.d/S55named -> ../init.d/named
* switching to higher runlevels - init will run
scripts that start with letter S, in ascending order of the number with
argument 'start'
* switching to lower runlevels - init will run
scripts that start with letter K, in decending order of the number with
argument 'stop'
The commands that deal with runlevels are:
/sbin/runlevel - shows the previous and current
runlevels
/sbin/init and /sbin/telinit - to switch
between runlevels
/sbin/chkconfig - to enable/disable services in
runlevels
This runlevel is used by sysadmins to perform routine maintenance.
Its most commonly used for checking errors in file system with command 'fsck'. Only the root file system will be mounted in this
runlevel and the system administrator is provided with a shell. If
necessary, other partitions needs to be mounted manually. Also none
of the deamons will be running in this runlevel. Only the system
administrator can use the system in this mode. You can simply exit
from the shell to boot it to the multiuser mode.
Though the system has been booted to a particular runlevel, none of
the users can login to the system until init spawns getty processes on
terminals. If the system is booted to runlevel 5, init needs to spawn
the graphical login system 'gdm'.
If the system has gone through the above mentioned stages without
any failures, you may say that your system is booted and is ready to
perform the tasks :)
We have discussed about the boot procedure so far. It is also important to shutdown the system properly. Otherwise you may end up with loss of data or serious damage to the file system.
You can safely use the commands /sbin/shutdown,
/usr/bin/halt or /usr/bin/reboot to halt or reboot the computer. For
more details of the commands, refer to the manual pages.
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More Articles by Prasad P M © 2015-04-15 Prasad P M
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Fri Feb 10 14:05:26 2006: 1618 TonyLawrence
Halt, shutdown and reboot are not really the same thing. In Linux from 2.74 on, but NOT in most other Unixes (and not in older Linux), "halt" or "reboot" will invoke "shutdown" if you are in any multiuser mode. On other Unixes, that doesn't happen.
Actually, I think this convenience is a design flaw, but Linux does provide "poweroff" which does answer the odd need of shutting off NOW.
Sun Feb 12 13:52:38 2006: 1632 drag
Also runlevels are going to differ from Linux-based operating system (or more easily GNU/Linux-based systems).
For instance Debian and Debian-based distros are very common and they use different runlevels and have different locations of scripts. As does Slackware, which is less common, but still fairly popular.
For instance the init scripts are found in /etc/init.d/ directory in Debian. The default runlevel is 2. 0 is 'halt', 6 is 'reboot'. Runlevels 2-5 are all the same thing; it's up to the administrator to choose what they mean.
Also there is no /etc/sysconfig folder in Debian. There is a /etc/defaults folder for lots of things, however. Also there is update-alternatives for Debian's alternative system (like if you have 2 different versions of gcc installed you can choose a default and have symlinks taken care of automaticly). There is also a /etc/modules you can put the name of kernel modules you want loaded automaticly at bootup time (also to control order they start up).
For Slackware it's much more different then either the RPM-using distros (Redhat, Mandriva, Suse, etc) or the Debian-based distros (Debian Stable, Ubuntu, Xandros, etc) You can find a better description then what I am able to give at Slackware's website. (link)
There is no runlevel directories, each runlevel is a simple bash script setups the services for that runlevel and uses "if file exists run script" arguments to launch various other scripts. The way to configure these scripts is to edit them manually. There is a 'system v' style init runlevel directories for compatability reasons.
rc.0 script is for "halt". rc.4 is for "multiuser with X-based login". rc.6 is for "reboot". rc.K is for "single user". rc.M is for "multiuser with text login".
So depending on what version of "linux" your using (which is a misnomer since some Linux distros differ so significantly that it's easier to consider them different operating systems sometimes) you can run into different setups.
Of course what you stated is going to be the most common that your going to run across since that is what Redhat uses.
Mon Feb 13 22:51:13 2006: 1637 prasad
The startup scripts and related parts are slightly different in other distros. As I am more familiar with and using RedHat OS, those parts were explained based on my desktop machine.
Prasad
Wed Apr 15 11:30:37 2015: 12661 TonyLawrence
Since this article was written, many distros have moved away from inittab. See (link)
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