[nylug-talk] equipment available

[Peter C. Norton]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 04:07:26PM -0400, Brian Mathis wrote:
> Does anyone know if EFI is supposed to resolve this?  This is the second 
> time in a few weeks I've heard people complaining about this issue.  I 
> always thought it was just me.

Nope. EFI is mostly junk in this regard, and as far as I can
see. Intel made some noise about replacing the need for a BMC and a
separate management controller but they haven't followed through
because there's no mass-market win for them, since the top-tier
systems makers each provide their own interface.

What I consider junk is:

1) No standard serial console support (or other remote console, though
I guess you could try to hack up an EFI serial video driver?)
2) No standard hardware reporting features
3) No programmable environment.
4) No out of band mgmt defined (I believe the EFI shell dissappears
once 

On the plus side, having some filesystem access from the preboot
environment is pretty cool.

-Peter

-- 
The 5 year plan:
In five years we'll make up another plan.
Or just re-use this one.