[Info-vax] Itanium boot menus, was: Re: WIN AN RX2660 ~~~THE GREAT INTEGRITY GIVE AWAY !!!

[Robert Deininger]

On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 7:51:49 AM UTC-4, Simon Clubley wrote:

> It's functional, it will only require a (relatively) small amount of
> code to implement and presumably it boots from an onboard flash chip
> which means you have a fixed amount of space for the boot code.
> 
> How big is the onboard flash for the Itanium systems and do you
> really want to waste a part of it implementing a pretty GUI ?
>
> Note: no Itanium experience here, so I don't know how large the 
> onboard flash is.

It varies from system to system, of course.

But the relevant question is NOT "how much onboard flash is there?"
It's "How much space is still empty?"  And the answer is generally,
"Not much."

It's more or less expected that an installed OS will provide
a more attractive boot manager and arrange to auto-start it by
default (except when the OS itself auto-boots), so customers shouldn't
generally see this EFI boot menu.

None of the EFI-level stuff is really aimed at end users. When it's
exposed, it likely indicates a gap in the software stack or the
pre-configured system options.