> Boot Customization

Normally, leaving the boot process alone is the safest way to proceed. There are a couple of potential tweaks that may be beneficial or, in some cases, necessary.

Reducing the loader timeout

By default, the boot loader will wait for 10 seconds at the boot menu just in case you need to modify the boot process. It's usually safe to reduce this in order to speed up the boot process.

bootadm set-menu timeout=3

The above command reduces the wait to 3 seconds, which is a good compromise. You don't wait too long, but still have the opportunity to get into the loader setup if you need to.

If you're using a headless system (where you have no access to the console) then it would be reasonable to reduce it all the way to 0.

Restricting the console device

The boot loader is designed to work on a wide range of systems, and it will accept input from all possible console devices. That includes the normal graphical display as well as serial devices.

If you just have a normal graphical screen (for example, on a PC or workstation, and most servers), then you can tell the boot loader to only use the regular screen and directly attached keyboard. To do this, create a file called

/boot/conf.d/console
and edit it so it contains the following
console="text"

If you have other devices connected to the serial ports on your PC (for example, I have the serial port on my desktop wired through to the legacy serial console on a server) then preventing the boot loader from accessing the serial ports is necessary to stop anything connected to a serial port from interfering with the boot process.


Index | Previous Section | Next Section


tribblix@gmail.com :: GitHub :: Privacy