Deploying UEFI‐Aware Operating Systems on Dell™ PowerEdge™ Servers By Anand Joshi, Bill Munger, Mark Shutt, Thomas Cantwell, and John Sieber
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Table of Contents History ................................................................................................................................................................... 2 What is UEFI? ......................................................................................................................................................... 2 What UEFI has to Offer ...............................................................................................................................
History In the mid‐1990s during the development of Intel’s Itanium‐based system, PC BIOS limitations (for example, 16‐bit processor mode, 1 MB addressable space, PC AT hardware dependencies, etc.) hindered platform development for Itanium. While the Itanium chip was not well received, the development exposed significant limitations to the original PC firmware architecture that led to the development of a new framework, called Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI).
What UEFI has to Offer The primary goal of UEFI is to define an architecture that can scale with time and to offer structured coding environment allowing easy enablement of new technology. The main characteristics of UEFI are: Abstraction for the Operation System. The UEFI specification provides an interface between the platform firmware and the operating system. The interfaces/API/protocols mark a clear boundary between the firmware and the operating system and the operating system loader.
Differences between BIOS and UEFI Boot Modes The following table highlights the differences between the boot modes. Boot Mode Feature BIOS UEFI Operating System Support Compatible with operating systems that do not support UEFI. All the current and legacy operation systems can be installed in this boot mode.
Booting to a Removable Media Device To make a removable device bootable, the UEFI application simply needs to be renamed to BOOTx64.EFI (case insensitive) and placed in the \EFI\BOOT directory. When a removable device, such as a USB key, is detected in UEFI Boot Mode, a boot option is automatically added to point to the following location: \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI UEFI Boot Manager The UEFI Boot Manager is entered by pressing during the pre‐boot phase of system startup.
Option this menu. Change Boot Order Allows the boot priority of the boot options to be modified. One‐Time Boot From File Provides a menu similar to that of Add Boot Option, but does not add the boot option. Instead, it attempts to boot to the selected file or device. System Utilities The System Utilities menu can be entered from the front page. The following options are available from this menu: Option Description System Setup Enters the System Setup Utility.
Deploying a UEFI‐Aware Operating System Once the hardware and firmware support UEFI, the operating system needs to be redesigned to support UEFI. UEFI is still an emerging technology and standard, so there are only a few operating systems that have full support. Dell offers both legacy BIOS‐mode and UEFI‐mode. Operating Systems that support UEFI ‐ 1) Microsoft® Windows ®Vista, SP1 and Windows Server® 2008 – X64 versions only.
expected. Dell recommends that you contact your application vendors for all mission‐critical applications to ensure they work in the UEFI environment. Limitations This section explains potential problems which may occur while installing a UEFI‐aware operating system and how to avoid them. Large Operating System Partitions An operating system installer relies on disk controller firmware to perform disk read/write functions prior to the disk driver is available.
