More Info on UEFI 2.5 HTTP Boot Implementations

Earlier, I made this blog post on UEFI 2.5’s new HTTP Boot feature. At that time, I was unaware of some details, like if this feature will be implemented in TianoCore, or only in commercial products. HP gave a talk at the Spring UEFI Forum on UEFI 2.5 HTTP Boot (to replace PXE) and DMTF Redfish (to replace IPMI), so I presume some new HP products will have these new features soon, if not already. On the EFI development list, I asked a question about Tianocore and vendor support of UEFI HTTP boot, as well as DMTF Redfish, and got 2 replies, one from Intel and one from HP.

Ye Ting of Intel replied and said:

“Intel is working on implementation of UEFI 2.5 HTTP boot support.”

Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud of HP also replied, and said:

“Both HTTP Boot and Redfish are very new standards. HTTP Boot got standardized as part of UEFI 2.5 in March. Redfish is still not even 1.0 (last published spec is 0.96.0a, with a target 1.0 spec sometime this month according to DMTF). It is expected that implementation will take some time to catch up to the spec. At the same time, PXE and IPMI have been there for quite some time, are implemented across the board on servers (and many clients), and are already in wide use. I do not expect them to go away anytime soon. But the goal is to switch over to HTTP and Redfish/REST over time, especially as they enable new use cases and capabilities that were not possible (or easy to do) before. The first step though is to get the specs implemented. As Ting explained, Intel is working on UEFI 2.5 HTTP Boot implementation (that I expect will show up in EDK2. I see the header files submitted already). DMTF is also working on a Redfish mockup/simulator that can be used to exercise clients. HP ProLiant Gen9 servers already support proprietary flavors of both HTTP Boot (or “Boot from URL”) and Redfish (or the “HP RESTful API”). I do not know of any other servers that implement such technologies at this time.”

So, it sounds like HP is the only vendor that supports UEFI HTTP Boot at the moment, and Intel is working on an implementation. If Intel’s implementation is part of TianoCore, other vendors may use it.

I’m looking forward to a TianoCore implementation, as well as DMTF’s Redfish simulator.

Thanks to Ye Ting and Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud for the answers!