system(4)system(4)NAMEsystem - system description configuration files
DESCRIPTION
The HP-UX system description file describes kernel configuration infor‐
mation used by the and commands.
The system description file consists of the following information:
· A line specifying the version of the system file.
· The list of packaged and traditional kernel modules to be
configured.
· Planned values for system tunable parameters, and other sys‐
tem-wide configuration information.
Lines starting with an asterisk are comment lines. HP discourages
adding comments to the system description file, since they are not pre‐
served by kernel configuration commands. See kconfig(5) for details.
HP-UX System Description File
System files may contain a line specifying which version of the system
file syntax was used when writing the file. If present, this line must
be the first non-comment line of the system description file. This is
the only line in the system description file that must occupy a partic‐
ular position. All other lines are position independent. This line has
the following format:
where the following values for version are allowed:
1 The system file is formatted as described in this manual
page.
0 The system file is formatted in the fashion used in HP-UX 11i
Version 1.6 and prior. This value is the default if no line
appears in the system file.
New system files should always be created using version 1 of the system
file syntax. Support for version 0 will be removed in a future HP-UX
release.
System files that are generated by the kernel configuration commands
will contain a line indicating which configuration is being described.
This line has the form:
where:
name is the name of the configuration,
title is the title of the configuration (in quotes), and
timestamp indicates the time at which the system file was
generated.
System files may contain lines that list the traditional and packaged
kernel modules (including device drivers and pseudo-drivers) that are
to be configured.
Each such line has one of the following two formats:
module where module is either a traditional or packaged kernel mod‐
ule name.
For example, selects the driver for SCSI disk drives, selects
the driver for SCSI tape drives, and selects the NFS subsys‐
tem. This line format is for backward compatibility. It
does not allow specification of the state of the module; the
module state will be the default state as given by the mod‐
ule's developer. To specify the desired state of the module,
use the second format.
where module is either a traditional or packaged kernel module
name. state is one of or see kcmodule(1M) for definitions of
these states.
version is version of the module. The version field is
optional. It should generally be omitted when manually edit‐
ing or creating system files. It is used by and when cloning
kernel configurations; see kconfig(1M) for details.
For example,
selects the driver for SCSI disk drives.
dynamically loads the module
System files may also contain lines that are used to:
· define the swap device
· define the dump device(s)
· provide an explicit binding a driver to a hardware path
· define status and values of selected system parameters.
Lines are constructed as indicated below for each category.
· Swap Device Specification
This method of swap specification will be obsoleted in future
releases. is the preferred method for configuring swap.
No more than one swap specification is allowed. If swap specifica‐
tion is not given, then primary swap binding is set to On a system
using the Logical Volume Manager (LVM), is equivalent to On other
systems, the is to page to the root disk, in the area between the
end of the root file system and the end of the disk.
Configure the swap device location and its size as specified.
Arguments are interpreted as follows:
hw_path The hardware path representing the device
to configure as the swap device or the
string default may be used to indicate
using the root device.
offset The swap area location. Boundaries are
located at 1K-byte intervals. A negative
value specifies that a file system is
expected on the device. At boot-up, the
super block is read to determine the exact
size of the file system, and this value is
put in offset. If the swap device is auto-
configured, this is the mechanism used. If
the super block is invalid, the entry will
be skipped so that a corrupted super block
will not later cause the entire file system
to be corrupted by configuring the swap
area on top of it. A positive or zero
value for offset specifies the minimum area
that must be reserved. Zero means to
reserve no area at the head of the device.
A zero value implies that there is no file
system on the device.
blocks The number (in decimal) of 1K-byte disk
blocks in the swap area. For this swap
device specification, only the blocks
parameter is optional. Zero is the default
for auto-configuration. If blocks is zero,
the entire remainder of the device is auto‐
matically configured in as swap area. If
blocks is non-zero, its absolute value is
treated as an upper bound for the size of
the swap area. Then, if the swap area size
has actually been cut back, the sign of
blocks determines whether blocks remains as
is, resulting in the swap area being adja‐
cent to the reserved area, or whether
blocks is bumped by the size of the unused
area, resulting in the swap area being
adjacent to the tail of the device.
Configure swap on a logical volume.
Configure the kernel with no swap device.
· Dump Device Specifications
One or more dump specifications are allowed. If a dump specifica‐
tion is not given, then the primary swap area will be used.
Configure the dump device location and its size as specified.
hw_path is the hardware path representing the device to configure as
a dump device or the string default may be used to indicate using
the primary swap area.
Configure dump on a logical volume.
Configure the kernel with no dump device.
· Explicit Device Driver Bindings
One or more driver to hardware path specifications is allowed. If a
driver statement is provided, the specified software module is
forced into the kernel I/O system at the given hardware path. This
can be used to make the system recognize a device that could not be
recognized automatically.
Bind the driver into the kernel I/O system at the given hardware
path.
Arguments are interpreted as follows:
hw_path The hardware path representing the
device to bind the software with.
driver_name The name of the software module to
bind into the kernel at the specified
hardware path.
· Kernel Tunable Parameter Settings
These lines contain the values (other than default) of kernel tun‐
able parameters that will be used for the kernel configuration. A
tunable value can be either a number or a formula, but it cannot
contain whitespace. If the tunable is user defined, then parame‐
ter_name is preceded by the keyword No whitespace is permitted
between and parameter_name. Each line has the following form:
Modular System File
Modular system files have been removed from the HP-UX configuration
paradigm. All the required information from modular system files have
been merged into the traditional system file itself thus creating a
single hpux system description file.
WARNINGS
The and lines are obsolete and will be removed in a future version of
HP-UX. Swap devices, dump devices, and driver bindings should be con‐
figured using the and commands, respectively.
FILES
HP-UX system description file for the
kernel configuration
HP-UX system description file for the kernel configuration named
config
SEE ALSOkconfig(1M), kctune(1M), mk_kernel(1M), swapctl(2), kconfig(5).
system(4)
