Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 2 Aug 2010 15:52:48 -0400 | From | Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <> | Subject | Re: [GIT PULL] iBFT features for v2.6.36 |
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On Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 11:22:21AM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > On 08/02/2010 07:36 AM, Konrad Rzeszutek wrote: > > What is iBFT? > > The iBFT is an equivalent to the Boot Flag, except that its geared > > towards iSCSI and hence requires much more information (such as > > the IP of target, passwords, which device to login, etc). iBFT > > is a data structure populated by the BIOS or the NIC to contain this > > so that the OS can read it and login to the iSCSI and present > > the boot device to the initrd for mounting / FS. > > I really don't see iBFT as equivalent to the boot flag at all. The boot
I think for somebody who might confuse iBFT with a bar of soap the "equivalant" will put them in the right frame of mind. And yes it is not equivalant at all, should have said something like 'remotely akin' :-)
> flag returns the status of the previous boot attempt; iBFT contains > information about where to find the current root. > > Unfortunately, we're increasingly seeing a proliferation of this kind of > nonstandard ACPI tables, because it is difficult to add data to ACPI at
Keep in mind that iBFT is now a standard (woot!)
> runtime. gPXE creates an aBFT table for AoE and sBFT for SRP, and > memdisk uses mBFT for MEMDISK at the moment.
Oh man, didn't know those existed at all. > > It would be good to have some kind of common structure framework for these.
I need to grok those tables some more to figure out what they all do.
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