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Testing during installation and booting introduces special considerations because not all system services are available throughout this process. Customers who are implementing support for new platforms have the greatest need for this, but driver writers also need this, especially when testing and debugging drivers for devices such as Host Bus Adapters and network cards that may themselves be used during system installation and initialization.
The SVR5 operating system release includes images for the ``magic floppy'' and ``debugging boot floppy'' that can be used to debug kernel code that is used during system initialization such as the driver for the hard disk that houses the / directory or filesystem code.
The magic floppy image contains a set of common shell commands such as editors and, on SVR5 systems, the truss command, that are not normally part of the installation system but are very useful when debugging kernel code.
The debugging boot floppy contains the installation kernel with the kdb debugger enabled. For SVR5, only kdb can be used for debugging during installation unless you create your own debugging boot floppy.
To use the magic floppy:
umount /flpy2
The debugging boot floppies are only needed by platform developers and others who are building the entire operating system, including the boot floppies.
To create debugging boot floppies from the boot floppy image:
On SCO OpenServer 5 systems, set the SCODB_MAINDB parameter to enable the scodb debugger during system initialization: