efi(4)                                                               efi(4)
                   Itanium(R)-Based Processor Family Only



 NAME    [Toc]    [Back]
      efi - Extensible Firmware Interface description

 DESCRIPTION    [Toc]    [Back]
      The EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) is an interface between HP-UX
      and the Itanium-based platform firmware.  The file system supported by
      the Extensible Firmware Interface is based on the FAT file system.
      EFI encompasses the use of FAT-32 for a system partition, and FAT-12
      or FAT-16 for removable media.  The system partition is required on a
      bootable disk for the Itanium-based platform.

      For a hard disk, the system partition is a contiguous grouping of
      sectors on the disk, where the starting sector and size are defined by
      the EFI partition table, which resides on the second logical block of
      the hard disk, and/or by the Master Boot Record (MBR), which resides
      on the first sector of the hard disk.  For a floppy disk, a partition
      is defined to be the entire disk.

      The System Partition can contain directories, data files, and EFI
      Images.  The EFI system firmware may search the \EFI directory of the
      EFI system partition, EFI volume, to find possible EFI Images that can
      be loaded.  The HP-UX bootloader is one example of an EFI Image.

      HP-UX contains a set of EFI utilities:

      efi_fsinit(1M) Initialize an EFI volume; that is, create a header and
                     an empty directory.

      efi_cp(1M)     Copy files to and from an EFI volume.

      efi_mkdir(1M)  Create directories in an EFI volume.

      efi_ls(1M)     List the contents of an EFI volume.

      efi_rm(1M)     Remove files from an EFI volume.

      efi_rmdir(1M)  Remove directories from an EFI volume.

      The EFI utilities are the only utilities in HP-UX where the internal
      structure of an EFI volume is known.  To the rest of HP-UX, an EFI
      system partition is simply a partition containing unspecified data.
      The EFI volume cannot be mounted to HP-UX currently.

      An EFI volume can be created on any HP-UX file (either regular disk
      file or device special file) that supports random access via lseek(2).
      Within an EFI volume, individual files and directories are identified
      by 1- to 255-character file names.  File names can consist of any
      alphanumeric characters (A through Z, a through z, and 0 through 9)
      and the certain set of special characters (. $ % ' - _ @ ~ ` ! ( ) + ,
      : ; = # & ? ^ [ ] { } space).  The first character of an EFI file name
      can be any valid EFI characters, except the space.  When comparing two



 Hewlett-Packard Company            - 1 -      HP-UX 11i Version 2: Sep 2004






 efi(4)                                                               efi(4)
                   Itanium(R)-Based Processor Family Only



      EFI names, differences in the case of alphabetic characters are not
      significant.  For example, the following file names are considered the
      same:

           ABC_file    [Toc]    [Back]
           abc_file

      If one exists, the user will not be able to create the other.

      The directory may be made up of multiple components, separated by
      slashes(/).  The last directory component must be followed by a slash
      to separate it from the file name.  There are two special directory
      components, (.) and (..).  They represent the current directory and
      the parent directory as in other file systems.

 SEE ALSO    [Toc]    [Back]
      efi_cp(1M), efi_fsinit(1M), efi_ls(1M), efi_mkdir(1M), efi_rm(1M),
      efi_rmdir(1M).


 Hewlett-Packard Company            - 2 -      HP-UX 11i Version 2: Sep 2004