It leads you through the steps involved in building kits for the various kinds of products, and it describes the installation options that the Digital UNIX system supports. After you determine the kind of kit your are building, you can go to individual chapters of the book for detailed steps for building your particular kit. The kitting process described in this book lets you deliver layered products for the Digital UNIX system. A layered product is any software product that is not part of the base operating system. Commands and utilities fall into this category, as do applications such as text editors and database systems.
Users interact directly with user products, for example, through commands or window interfaces.
A kernel product runs in kernel space. Users do not directly run kernel products, but the operating system and utilities access them to perform their work. For example, a device driver is one common type of kernel product. A user runs an application or utility, which generates system requests to perform operations such as opening a file or writing data to a disk. The system determines which device driver should service this request, then calls the appropriate driver interface.