hp workstations zx6000, hp server rx2600 - operation and maintenance guide

System Configuration
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)
Chapter 3
96
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)
The section introduces you to the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and explains how
to use it for configuring your system. Here are the topics covered:
• EFI Overview
• Accessing the EFI Shell
• EFI Editor Commands
• EFI Configuration Menus
• Updating Your Firmware
• Classes of EFI Commands
• Creating EFI Shell Scripts
EFI Overview
The file system supported by the Extensible Firmware Interface is based on the File
Allocation Table (FAT) file system. EFI encompasses the use of FAT-32 for a system
partition. The system partition is required on a bootable disk for the IA-64 platform.
For a hard disk, the system partition is a contiguous grouping of sectors on the disk,
where the starting sector and size are defined by the EFI partition table, which resides
on the second logical block of the hard disk, and/or by the Master Boot Record (MBR),
which resides on the first sector of the hard disk.
The system partition can contain directories, data files, and EFI images. The EFI system
firmware may search the \EFI directory of the EFI system partition, EFI volume, to find
possible EFI images that can be loaded. The HP-UX bootloader is one example of an EFI
image.
The EFI commands used by the EFI shell are given in the section “Classes of EFI
Commands” in this chapter. This section gives a brief description of the commands. You
can obtain a detailed description of the commands online by typing help and the
command name at the EFI shell prompt. For example, to get a detail description of the
date command, you would type the following at the shell prompt and press Enter:
Shell> help date
NOTE For VGA devices, no SAL forward progress is displayed and EFI boot messages are
displayed only after the VGA card is initialized. This happens fairly late in the boot
sequence. The amount of time that no output appears on the VGA console is at least one
and a half minutes and it grows as more memory is added to the system. For example, it
can take approximately five minutes for systems with 48 GB of memory.