Booting on IBM RS/6000 and pSeries

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Boot from the CD

CD1 is bootable. Go to the SMS menu during boot by holding down the '1' key on serial console or 'F1' when a keyboard is attached. Choose 'Select boot options -> Install device' and select the CD.

Boot via Network

Copy the files yaboot, yaboot.cnf, and inst64 from CD1/suseboot/ to your /tftpboot directory. On a 32-bit machine, use the inst32 file instead. Rename yaboot.cnf to yaboot.conf. yaboot only looks for yaboot.conf on network devices. The files 'inst64' and 'inst32' can be booted directly without yaboot.

Boot Loader Configuration in the Installed System

pSeries use the yaboot boot loader to provide a list of configured kernels during start-up and to load the kernel and initrd from the hard disk or via network. To reduce the hassle of configuration, a wrapper script 'lilo' exists to generate a yaboot.conf file suitable for your setup. lilo uses a simple config file /etc/lilo.conf that contains a list of kernels and the boot partition. It supports also root on jfs, RAID, and LVM, in this case, a small FAT partition is created because yaboot cannot read the kernel from such a setup. An example config:

# wait 10 seconds for user input
timeout=100
# kernel to boot when no user input was given
default=linux
# update the firmware boot-device variable
activate
# small 0x41 PReP Boot partition
boot=/dev/sda
#
# kernel ELF binary
image=/boot/vmlinux
       label=linux
       initrd=/boot/initrd
       # kernel cmdline options
       # quiet to surpress the useless kernel messages
       # sysrq= to allow backtrace when things go downhill
       append="root=/dev/sda3 quiet sysrq=1"

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