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FILE FORMAT

The format of the file is a series of lines containing keyword/value pairs separated by an equals sign (‘=’). There should be no whitespace surrounding the equals sign. Lines beginning with a hash (‘#’) are comments and will be ignored.

Some keywords can be present multiple times in the file to define additional items. Such keywords are noted below.

banner

(may be present multiple times) The text from banner lines is displayed instead of the standard welcome text by the boot loader. Up to 10 lines can be defined. No special character sequences are recognised, so to specify a blank line, a banner line with no value should be given.

clear

If nonzero, clear the screen before printing the banner. If zero, do not clear the screen (the default).

consdev

Changes the console device to that specified in the value. Valid values are any of those that could be specified at the normal boot prompt with the consdev command.

default

Used to specify the default menu item which will be chosen in the case of Return being pressed or the timeout timer reaching zero. The value is the number of the menu item as displayed. As described above, the menu items are counted from 1 in the order listed in boot.cfg. If not specified, the default value will be option 1, i.e. the first item.

format

Changes how the menu options are displayed. Should be set to one of ‘a’ for automatic, ‘l’ for letters and ‘n’ for numbers. If set to automatic (the default), menu options will be displayed numerically unless there are more than 9 options and the timeout is greater than zero. If there are more than 9 options with a timeout greater than zero and the format is set to number, only the first 9 options will be available.

load

Used to load kernel modules, which will be passed on to the kernel for initialization during early boot. The argument is either the complete path and file name of the module to be loaded, or a symbolic module name. When the argument is not an absolute path, the boot loader will first attempt to load /stand/<machine>/<kernel_version>/modules/<name>/<name>.kmod. If that file does not exist, it will then attempt to load /<name>. May be used as many times as needed.

menu

(may be present multiple times) Used to define a menu item to be displayed to the end-user at boot time which allows a series of boot commands to be run without further typing. The value consists of the required menu text, followed by a colon (‘:’) and then the desired command(s). Multiple commands can be specified separated by a semi-colon. If the specified menu text is empty (the colon appears immediately after the equals sign), then the displayed menu text is the same as the command. For example:

menu=Boot normally:boot
menu=Boot single-user:boot -s
menu=Boot with module foo:load /foo.kmod;boot
menu=Boot with serial console:consdev com0;boot
menu=:boot hd1a:netbsd -as

Each menu item will be prefixed by an ascending number when displayed, i.e. the order in the boot.cfg file is important.

Each command is executed just as though the user had typed it in and so can be any valid command that would be accepted at the normal boot prompt. In addition, “prompt” can be used to drop to the normal boot prompt.

rndseed

Takes the path to a random-seed file as written by the -S flag to rndctl(8) as an argument. This file is used to seed the kernel entropy pool rnd(9) very early in kernel startup, so that high quality randomness is available to all kernel modules. This argument should be supplied before any “load” commands that may load executable modules.

timeout

If the value is greater than zero, this specifies the time in seconds that the boot loader will wait for the end-user to choose a menu item. During the countdown period, they may press Return to choose the default option or press a number key corresponding to a menu option. If any other key is pressed, the countdown will stop and the user will be prompted to choose a menu option with no further time limit. If the timeout value is set to zero, the default option will be booted immediately. If the timeout value is negative or is not a number, there will be no time limit for the user to choose an option.

userconf

Passes a userconf(4) command to the kernel at boot time.