SRM Firmware Howto

Rich Payne, and David Huggins-Daines

v0.8, 09 November 2000

This document describes how to boot Linux/Alpha using the SRM console, which is the console firmware also used to boot Compaq Tru64 Unix (also known as Digital Unix and OSF/1) and OpenVMS.

Table of Contents

1. About this manual

1.1. Who should read this manual

1.2. Conventions

2. What is SRM?

2.1. Getting to SRM

2.2. Using the SRM console

2.3. How Does SRM Boot an OS?

2.4. Loading The Secondary Bootstrap Loader

3. SRM Device Naming

3.1. The First Two Letter

3.2. The Rest Of The Device Name

4. The Raw Loader

5. The aboot Loader

5.1. Getting and Building aboot

5.2. Floppy Installation

5.3. Harddisk Installation

5.4. CD-ROM Installation

5.5. Building the Linux Kernel

5.6. Booting Linux

5.7. Setting up a BOOTP capable server using DHCP

5.8. Booting Over the Network

5.9. Partitioning Disks

6. Sharing a Disk With DEC Unix

6.1. Partitioning the disk

6.2. Installing aboot

7. Installation of Distributions

7.1. RedHat 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2

7.2. SuSE 6.1

7.3. SuSE 6.3

8. Document History