winscape 2350
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No, we are not going in circles. I think you are missing the equivalent of an instruction in your code :-). Once you get that...
A sysgen is a build, not an installation. The output of a sysgen is an executable that then can be booted up and run. IBM was unique in...
Well, your original description of "cold start" (which I've left in, above) sure sounded to me like a description of a complete installation, which I found strange, because I had always buttumed that "cold start" and "warm start" were basically different varieties of what would in the PC world be called "rebooting".
Not relevant to what I was saying. I'm not trying to describe the process whereby a system goes from powered-off to running an operating system ("the boot process"). I'm trying to describe the process whereby the bits that come on the installation media are are transformed into something that can be used as input to the boot process.
See above.
I know about two forms of "installation". One of them -- the one that seems to be common in PCland -- happens after booting from an "install disk". The other one -- IBM mainframe sysgen -- happens on an already-running system. Either way you have *something* running on the system that's capable of writing to devices.
Note again that I am not at all attempting to describe what happens when you turn the power on.
Lars Poulsen has posted a nice description of sysgens in the IBM mainframe world and when they were required. "With every system restart" would only be true if "system restart" means something very different from what I would have thought it meant (some variety of "reboot").
Perhaps what you're calling "user build" is what I'm calling "installation", and what you're calling "system startup" is what I'm calling "reboot-IPL".
Say what?
Again I wonder whether we're really communicating; I'm describing something ("installation") that requires a running system of some sort (possibly booted from an installation medium), while I *think* you're describing something ("booting") that starts with nothing in core and produces a running system.
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True. Now I'm (more) curious. Is it anything like what I just described?
(One of the things that has been most interesting to me about my current gig is finding out how complicated and contentious running a university can be -- and the parts I'm getting exposed to are far from the whole story.)
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-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
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