HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Configuration Management

10 Configuring the Kernel
With each successive release of HP-UX, system administrators have increasing ability
to make changes to the configuration of the HP-UX kernel without experiencing costly
and inconvenient downtime. Innovations such as Dynamic Kernel Tunables and
Dynamically Loadable Kernel Modules allow critical maintenance tasks to be performed
without sacrificing application availability.
With these innovations comes the need for a simpler and more comprehensive
mechanism to manage kernel configurations. This chapter describes a suite of kernel
configuration management commands and a web- and text-based interface that provide
unified kernel configuration management. It is intended for use by HP-UX system
administrators.
Kernel Configuration Features
The suite of kernel configuration tools provides several key features for system
administrators:
• All kernel configuration tasks can be performed in a single graphical interface.
• All kernel configuration tasks can also be performed with a cohesive set of
commands with the same user interface and same behavior.
• Kernel configurations can be saved and restored, and moved between systems.
• Administrators can save any number of kernel configurations, and can switch
between them at will — often without a reboot.
• The running kernel configuration is automatically backed up (if desired) before
each configuration change.
• The system automatically maintains a detailed log file of all kernel configuration
changes.
• Kernel modules and kernel tunable parameters now have descriptions associated
with them. Kernel tunable parameters have online documentation, and descriptions
of the relationships between them.
• All kernel configuration commands can produce output in both user-friendly and
script-friendly formats. HP supports release-to-release compatibility for the
script-friendly formats.
Kernel Configuration Features 153