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Article Description
One of the most apt uses for the UEFI Shell is in the base metal provisioning of a system. There is a point where the system board has been manufactured, peripherals have been attached and tested, but there is not necessarily an operating system. The act of configuring the operating system or providing a new operating system is called bare metal provisioning. We refer to this action as bare metal because the only services exposed by the platform at this point are carried with the system board, namely its UEFI firmware. This differs from OS-hosted provisioning wherein a fully extant operating system with all of its capabilities is used to host the provisioning session. In the bare-metal case, the system firmware provides the I/O and console interfaces to the provisioning agent. To illustrate the usage of the UEFI Shell for provisioning, a network-based deployment scenario will be reviewed. During this scenario, the various facets of the UEFI Shell and its utility will be demonstrated. (10 pages, PDF, 363KB)
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