Chapter 6. IBM System x3850 X5 and x3950 X5 2596.9 UEFI settingsThe Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is the interface between the operatingsystem (OS) and platform firmware. UEFI provides a modern, well-defined environment forbooting an OS and running pre-boot applications.UEFI is effectively the replacement for BIOS. BIOS has been around for many years but wasnot designed to handle the amount of hardware that can be added to a server today. New IBMSystem x models and BladeCenter Blades implement UEFI to take advantage of its advancedfeatures.The UEFI page is accessed by pressing F1 during the system initializing process, as shownon Figure 6-37.Figure 6-37 UEFI window on system start-upIf you use the factory defaults UEFI settings, the machine works in a either a 1-node, 2-node,or 1-node with MAX5 configuration. You can also change UEFI settings to meet your systemrequirements. In this section, we provide an overview of the UEFI settings for tuning yoursystem for performance.For an explanation of each setting, see 2.7, “UEFI system settings” on page 36.You can use the Advanced Settings Utility (ASU) tool to change the UEFI settings values.ASU exposes more settings than the settings accessed using the F1-Setup panel. For moreinformation about ASU, see 9.7, “Advanced Settings Utility (ASU)” on page 495.Table 6-8 on page 260 provides an overview of the most common UEFI settings for optimizingsystem performance.
