Chapter 1. Booting: EFI and Management Processor

This chapter covers booting an HP Integrity (Itanium-based) server. Booting an Integrity server requires that you become familiar with two levels of firm ware. The first level is HP's implementation of Intel's EFI (Extensible Firm ware Interface), POSSE (Pre-OS System Environment). The second is HP's independent support processor for the system console, the Management Processor (MP). Although functionality varies from one platform to another the topics in this chapter apply to all HP Integrity servers at the time of this writing. The systems used throughout this chapter include a variety of two and four-way Integrity servers.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• EFI and POSSE

• Management Processor (MP)

In addition to providing background on these topics, this chapter also provides many examples of running commands and analyzing output for both POSSE and MP.

At the end, you can use an excellent series of tables as a quick reference for many boot-related commands.