[Beowulf] UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) for the BIOS

[David N. Lombard]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 04:47:42PM -0800, Rahul Nabar wrote:
> Has anyone tried out UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) in
> the BIOS? The new servers I am buying come with this option in the
> BIOS. Out of curiosity I googled it up.
> 
> I am not sure if there were any HPC implications of this and wanted to
> double check before I switched to this from my conventional
> plain-vanilla BIOS. Any sort of "industry standard" always sounds good
> but I thought it safer to check on the group first....

Just catching up w/ email.  SC derails most normal work...

I use UEFI, but, well, that shouldn't be a large surprise.  elilo is the boot loader,
it's written in C, and quite easy to manage.  I actually use an abridged version of
elilo to load a Linux kernel/initrd that provides my booting support.  You can, for
example, put the kernel/initrd normally PXE booted directly on the node and get into
that w/o having to deal with PXE, TFTP, et al.  Once you get that far, you can then
carefully tune the kernel/initrd to exquisitely control the boot process.

-- 
David N. Lombard, Intel, Irvine, CA
I do not speak for Intel Corporation; all comments are strictly my own.