Subj : uefi
To   : Gerrit Kuehn
From : Kai Richter
Date : Thu Jun 02 2022 11:43 pm

Hello Gerrit!

01 Jun 22, Gerrit Kuehn wrote to Kai Richter:

 GK> The difference is that without UEFI you need DOS on the USB stick, not
 GK> just your BIOS flash tool and image. Ever tried booting modern
 GK> server-hardware under DOS and running BIOS-update tools from that?

No, i use PXE images for that. Doesn't have a modern server IPMI and does the flash via ipmi bios image upload?

 KR>> Same task, we need to kickstart the boot sequence.

 GK> No, we need to come up with an environment that is able to run the
 GK> flash tool the manufacturer provides.

No matter what OS runs for those tools - we still need to kickstart them.

 GK> If this tool is for EFI shell, this is easy. Getting a DOS tool to
 GK> run under DOS booted from a USB stick... your mileage may vary.

This is the responsiblity of the hardware manufacturer. Btw, let's look on the uefi shell. It can read partitions and filesystems and load/start software from. Do you remember toms root boot on a floppy disk? Basically it does the same. The uefi shell is not a shell of the bios - it's an operating system. If the flash tool is efi software the efi shell OS could be placed on the USB stick too. And again, the only job of the BIOS (remember it's BASIC IO) is to kickstart the boot sequence for an OS.

 GK> I didn't mean to say that EFI might fully replace your rescue disk
 GK> (whatever it looks like), it certainly doesn't. But in some at least
 GK> for me quite common cases where you just want to get the system booted

Which common cases on uefi systems do break the boot process?

 GK> it serves that purpose and relieves me from having to boot the rescue
 GK> disk.

Regards

Kai

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