UEFI 2.4 Review, Part 7: Greater than 256 NICs support on UNDI

This is the seventh part in an ongoing series of articles examining the changes found in the UEFI 2.4 specification. This time we look at the expansion of the low-level network interfaces to support more than 256 network identifiers. This is not about maintaining more than 256 connections in a UEFI environment, but rather tracking them and uniquely identifying them so that, for example, their firmware can be updated.

Specifically, this updates the EFI_NETWORK_INTERFACE_IDENTIFIER_PROTOCOL, updating its revision and changing the last UINT8 field to a UINT16. This change allows the new protocol to be created even for existing systems, since they will have a interface number of 0-255 and, since UEFI is little-endian, the low 8 bits of a UINT16 have the lowest address in a structure.

This update also modifies the UNDI structures, which are used by standard network cards to expose their networking capabilities. In previous revisions, there were two reserved bytes at offsets 0x0A and 0x0B, which were always set to 0. Now, one of these reserved bytes is take as the upper 8 bits of the interface count field. The lower 8 bits are still found at offset 0x03.

Now most of us don't normally deal with systems that hundreds of network interfaces. But then again, most of us aren't Facebook or Google where there are thousands of little boxes in a building somewhere and all of them need to be hooked up, configured and brought on-line. The earliest phase of the configuration is called bare-metal provisioning, where a new box, fresh out of the box is just plugged into a network and boots over that network into an environment that updates its settings and installs the OS that it will use. UNDI helps handle that in UEFI, by providing a standardized low-level interface to the NICs, but it was designed long before this number of interfaces was even considered remotely possible.

But now the UEFI specification can handle it.