bryan wann :: binary fury

Storage and network option ROM settings

It turns out my SuperMicro A1SAI boards made a fucking liar out of me. I bitched and moaned it was 2016 and they didn’t support UEFI PXE booting despite supporting UEFI, but they do. I just didn’t know where to look. Under “PCIe/PCI/PNP Configuration” in boot setup, the “Launch Storage OpROM Policy” and “Launch Network OpROM Policy” options are by default set to “Legacy”. These are what enable legacy BIOS vs UEFI OS booting and PXE booting options. (“Option ROM policies”). Here PXE booting with IPv6 and IPv4 can be enabled with the on-board Ethernet interfaces.

Set them to “UEFI”, reboot, go back into boot configuration again and now under the “Boot” menu there will be a whole new set of boot options including UEFI network booting. Now you can install a UEFI native OS over the network with v6 or v4 without relying on a NIC’s own option ROM to provide PXE support. (My boards have quad on-board interfaces so I wind up with 10 boot options)

oh look! UEFI IP6 boot options

Once the OS is installed in a UEFI native way, we can poke at things with efibootmgr and life is grand.

[root@basic10 ~]# efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0006,0007,0000
Boot0000* CentOS
Boot0003* UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell
Boot0004* Hard Drive
Boot0006* UEFI: IP4 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I354
Boot0007* UEFI: IP6 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I354
Boot0008* UEFI: IP4 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I354
Boot0009* UEFI: IP6 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I354
Boot000A* UEFI: IP4 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I354
Boot000B* UEFI: IP6 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I354
Boot000C* UEFI: IP4 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I354
Boot000D* UEFI: IP6 Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I354

[root@basic10 ~]# ls -l /boot/efi/EFI/centos/
total 5784
-rwx------ 1 root root     128 Dec  7 05:19 BOOT.CSV
drwx------ 2 root root    4096 May  2 22:33 fonts
-rwx------ 1 root root 1009536 Jan  5 09:51 gcdx64.efi
-rwx------ 1 root root    4349 May  2 22:38 grub.cfg
-rwx------ 1 root root    1024 May  2 22:38 grubenv
-rwx------ 1 root root 1009536 Jan  5 09:51 grubx64.efi
-rwx------ 1 root root 1283952 Dec  7 05:19 MokManager.efi
-rwx------ 1 root root 1291512 Dec  7 05:19 shim-centos.efi
-rwx------ 1 root root 1296176 Dec  7 05:19 shim.efi

Tags: centos, ipv6