On 7/26/24 07:14, Bryce wrote:
I tried some googling but I couldn't find out what's usually in `boot_archive', nor could I find anything in illumos-gate relating to a default, nor in oi-userland. Is boot_archive generated per distro or is it in illumos-gate?
The boot archive is generated by 'bootadm update-archive', which can be run manually by the administrator but it generally gets run automatically when needed at reboot time and by the svc:/system/boot-archive-update SMF service (which runs at boot once the relevant filesystems are mounted read-write).
Under the covers, 'bootadm update-archive' runs the /boot/solaris/bin/extract_boot_filelist script to enumerate the files and directories from the real root that should be included in the archive. Note that if a directory is named, the entire tree rooted at that directory is included.
As others have mentioned, SmartOS does things somewhat differently but the above applies to most general-purpose illumos distributions.
I read the bootadm(8) man page hoping for some answers but none came. Although it did mention the available archive formats, does that mean that boot_archive is archived into an (eg cpio) archive, and then mounted RO by the kernel so it can load the modules necessary to talk to the hardware?
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