A command interperter used by all Sun Microsystems boxen.
Implemented in firmware, its purpose is to allow finegrained control
of the boot procedure and provide some pre-boot hardware diagnostics.
Strictly, OBP is a forth interpreter, but with several canned
scripts to do most anything one might need to do. OBP is characterized
by it's "ok " prompt.
A couple of commands I remember:
- boot [device] [boot args]
- Boot the machine. device is usually an alias created with
nvalias. Boot args are passed to init, things like -s
for single user, -r for reprobe/reconfig, etc.
- nvalias [device path] [alias]
- Create device aliases. "disk" is easier to type than
"/pci/pci@00ff/dc-001c@0,1" etc. usually used with ^Y and the
show-disks/show-nets commands.
- show-disks
- Prints a list of all detected disks (actually disk controllers)
connected, labeled a, b, c, etc, and prompts you to enter one of
the labeled letters. Entering that letter will put the associated
device name in the ^Y cut/paste buffer, allowing easy use with
nvalias.
- show-nets
- Same idea as show-disks, but with network interfaces.
- probe-scsi-all
- Probe all detected scsi cards for connected disks & print out
their manufacture's information. Useful for troubleshooting bad
disks, cables, etc.
- test [device]
- Perform a self test on the sepecified device. Handy on
network interfaces, as it will test both the card and show
the link status.
- watch-nets
- Watch for packets. Will print a . for each good packet
recieved, & an x for each bad packet. test net tells you
if you have link, watch-nets tells you if you're actually seeing
packets.
- reset-all
- Reset all OBP options and paremeters to their factory defaults.
Useful for restoring a confused, fubar'd OBP to normal working
order. A last resort on a mysterious misconfiguration, or a handy
quickfix when maintaining an army of Sun boxen.