[Beowulf] Re: Any industry-standards that allow automated BIOS modifications and dumping? IPMI cannot do it, can it?

[Mark Hahn]

> there sometime!...shouldn't this be an enterprise-level concern not
> just HPC? I mean what if you have 200 Windows machines and wanted to
> turn hyperthreading off in the BIOS.

first, you don't really depend solely on the bios for HT.  next,
those 200 boxes are probably spread out, and possibly not remote-managable in
the first case.  next, business IT support normally has a drone class,
whose existence is predicated on doing this sort of thing.  at least 
at my HPC organization, there are no drones (flatter hierarchy - not that 
we're just superior ;)

I would love a documented bios setting interface, but I don't think 
it's salient on the radar of the mass market.

>> bios-serial-redirection and serial-over-lan can let you do it manually.
>
> I know about SOL but what's the "bios-serial-redirection". Is that the
> same or a different system?

bioses can have a setting which enables interaction with the bios (at post
time) through a serial port.  that serial port may also be redirected over
the lan.  these are semi-independent features (the first mainly concerns 
the bios; the latter mainly the bmc that implements ipmi.)