Kernel parameter

A kernel parameter is a parameter the bootloader hands over to the kernel. By each kernel parameter, the kernel is told how to do its work, for example, from which partition to boot or which runlevel to chose.

You can find out the kernel parameters of your running system with

cat /proc/cmdline

With recent boot loaders, you have the possibility to chose your kernel parameters during the boot process. For knoppix, this will look like this

knoppix 2

This example tells knoppix to boot into runlevel 2.

You can configure your default kernel parameters depending on your bootloader and distribution, e.g. for SUSE Linux with the grub bootloader, you can set them in /boot/grub/menu.lst.