On Monday 21 Mar 2011 21:40:31 Stefan Hajnoczi wrote: > > Yes, iPXE for UEFI exists and works. Last tested by me about a week ago, > > on various IBM UEFI systems. > > > > Compared to a "legacy" BIOS network boot, you can't do anything very > > interesting with UEFI. Features such as iSCSI, FCoE, AoE, HTTP all work > > with a "legacy" BIOS but not with UEFI. A "legacy" BIOS network boot > > allows you to boot an operating system; a UEFI network boot only allows > > you to boot an EFI executable (which could be a second-stage OS loader). > > Would it be possible to enable the more interesting things by > registering as a network device or block device with UEFI? I don't > know much about UEFI but I seem to remember that you can do that > rather than being a pure bootloader that loads an EFI executable?
Yes, and that's what we already do. Third-party products can, in theory at least, use the SNP device provided by an iPXE driver to communicate over the network via any protocol that the third-party product wants to implement. What I meant is that the iSCSI, FCoE, Infiniband, etc. functionality that is built in to iPXE and available to a "legacy" BIOS cannot be exposed under UEFI. You need a third-party product which in some cases (e.g. for HTTP boot or to use an Infiniband HCA) may not yet exist. I'm actually quite looking forward to finding a practical use case for UEFI. All instances that I've seen so far involve nothing more than adding approximately five _minutes_ of initial boot delay before dropping into the "legacy" boot environment. Michael
