LINUX START UP PROCESS

Step1: power on
Step 2: as soon as you power on the system the BIOS (basic input output device) sends a
POST (power on self-test) signal to all the component. Bios is a very small chip mounted on
the motherboard which stores that program. Beside that a cmos battery is also present so the
cmos battery always gives power to the chip even after main power is gone. That is why time
is always correct even after power off. All the component will send a acknowledge message
to the bios in response of post. If component is unable to acknowledge the post signal, then
bios will consider it as a failure component.
Step3: BIOS knows the size of hard drive, ram, CPU and some other details. So, after post it
will try to search the 1st boot sector in the hard drive. 1st boot sector size is 512 bytes. 512 is
divided into three parts.
1. PTI- PARTITION TABLE INFORMATION - 64BYTE/4=16BYTE PER
PRIMARY PARTITION
2. IPL- INITIAL PROGRAM LOADER - 446BYTE
3. MN- MAGIC NO -2BYTE
So, bios now will search the ipl in the 1st boot sector. If it found that then it will execute the
ipl program from the hard drive. Then when executed then it will give the whole control to
the ipl program.
Step4: now ipl will search for the bootloader in the /boot directory. When we power on a
option we get to choose the kernel. That page is given by grub2 bootloader which helps us to
select kernel. When the kernel is selected and then it will start loading os. It is done by
vmlinuz and initramfs.
Step5: when whole kernel and the os is loaded into the ram then the bootloader will give
control to the 1st process in linux and that is systemd. Now systemd will start all the enabled
services in the linux.
Step6: when every enabled services is running then os will now open either in cli mode or in
gui mode. It depends on the target we have selected. If multi-user.target is selected then
system will open in cli mode and if system is set on graphical.target then system will open in
gui mode. After that login page you will get.