13.4. Making the CLFS System Bootable via Colo

Your shiny new CLFS system is almost complete. One of the last things to do is ensure you can boot it. The instructions below apply only to Cobalt RaQ1/RaQ2/Cube2 servers. Information on “boot loading” for other architectures should be available in the usual resource-specific locations for those architectures.

Boot loading can be a complex area, so a few cautionary words are in order. Be familiar with the current boot loader and any other operating systems present on the hard drive(s) that need to be bootable. Make sure that an emergency boot disk is ready to “rescue” the computer if the computer becomes unusable (un-bootable).

Earlier, we compiled and installed the Cobalt boot loader software in preparation for this step. Now we will configure our system to boot using Colo. Here is a simple default.colo to use.

cat > /boot/default.colo << "EOF"
#:CoLo:#
#
# load linux
#
lcd 'Booting 4.9.21...'
load vmlinux-4.9.21.gz
execute root=/dev/hda2 console=ttyS0,115200 ide1=noprobe
EOF

Included in /usr/lib/colo/examples are more examples of a default.colo file.

The FHS stipulates that the bootloader's configuration file should be symlinked to /etc/{Bootloader Name}. To satisfy this requirement for Colo, issue the following command:

mkdir -v /etc/colo &&
ln -sv /boot/colo/default.colo /etc/colo