3-2 SPARCengine Ultra AX
i
OEM Technical Manual • May 1999
3.1.1 Terminology
The terminology used in this manual generally follows industry conventions. The
following list defines the specific meanings of words and terms as used in this
section.
Boot The process of initializing the hardware to execute and run an
operating environment such as Solaris 2.6.
Device tree The OBP probing process constructs a hierarchical representation of
the hardware devices that are found on the bus, the host-bus being
the root. The device tree includes several device nodes, (PCI bus is a
device-node).
Firmware This is software which stays with the hardware usually in a PROM or
similar device. Referred to as OBP in IEEE 1275 standards. In the
Ultra AXi implementation, release version 3.10.x and later are
applicable. This version comes with the motherboard. The user may
upgrade the OBP to a newer version if needed.
Hardware The Ultra AXi motherboard assembly, CPU module, cables and
peripheral devices are typical examples of hardware.
NVRAMRC Acronym for non-volatile random-access memory run command.
This refers to the executable OBP script that is written in the NV-
RAM. Other text information or binary data may exist in the
NVRAM, but is not referred to as NVRAMRC.
OBP Acronym for Open Boot PROM. This refers to a memory device
which consists of executable code by the UltraSPARC IIi CPU. The
code is responsible for initialization of the hardware and booting the
system to bring up the Solaris operating environment.
Probing A process implemented in the firmware and software to identify
onboard hardware devices and add-on cards on the PCI bus. The
probing process creates the device-tree.
Software A collection of machine readable information, instructions, data and
procedures that enable the computer to perform specific functions.
Typically stored on removable media.
Solaris The UNIX operating system from Sun. The SPARC V9 architecture
version is used with the Ultra AXi.
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