Dell PowerEdge T710 Deployment Manual

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Contents

Dell PowerEdge T710 Deployment Manual Manual pdf 5 page image

Page 3What UEFI has to OfferThe primary goal of UEFI is to define an architecture that can scale with time and to offer structured codingenvironment 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 platformfirmware and the operating system. The interfaces/API/protocols mark a clear boundary between thefirmware and the operating system and the operating system loader.Abstraction for devices and related code. UEFI abstracts interfaces that make it possible to build codewhich works on a range of underlying hardware devices without having explicit knowledge of the specificsfor each device. The specification defines interfaces to platform capabilities such as standard bus types(PCI, USB, and SCSI). The list of supported bus types may grow over time. These defined interfaces and theability to extend to future bus types are components of the UEFI Driver Model.Scalable platform environment. The specification defines a complete solution for the firmware todescribe all platform features and capabilities to the operating system during the boot process. Thesedefinitions cover a range of the contemporary platform designs but are simple enough to be able toextend in the future.Operating System Agnostic Rich Pre‐Boot environment. The UEFI specification defines extensibleinterfaces that enable creation of platform drivers. The drivers, analogous to operating system drivers,provide support for new devices and may provide enhanced platform capabilities, such as firmwareupdate, platform configuration, diagnostics and deployment services. The existence of networking, USB,and file system capabilities adds to the richness of the pre‐boot environment.GUID Partition Table. The UEFI defines a new standard layout for the partition table, known as GUIDPartition Table (GPT). GPT provides a more flexible mechanism for partitioning disks than the MasterBoot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme that has been common to computers. MBR disks support onlyfour partition table entries and the partition size is limited to 2TB. GPT scheme allows up to 128 primarypartitions and can support larger than 2‐terabyte partitions. Some near‐term limitations to 2 terabytesupport exist due to device support, but once devices fully support GPT/UEFI, this will no longer be anissue. See the “Limitations” section.How is Dell’s UEFI implemented?To support booting to both UEFI and non‐UEFI aware operating systems, the Dell BIOS supports a Boot Modeoption in the BIOS Setup Utility. The Boot Mode can be set to BIOS or UEFI.Setting the Boot Mode to UEFI allows booting to a UEFI‐aware operating system and provides the UEFI BootManager. This is the only change required to enable UEFI on the system. Setting the Boot Mode to BIOS providessupport for all current and legacy operation systems.