Glossary
Version 1.02 12/12/00 371
System Partition
A section of a block device that is treated as a logical whole. For a hard disk with a
legacy partitioning scheme, it is a contiguous grouping of sectors whose starting sector
and size are defined by the Master Boot Record. For an EFI Hard Disk, it is a
contiguous grouping of sectors whose starting sector and size are defined by the GUID
Partition Table Header and the associated GUID Partition Entries. For “El Torito”
devices, it is a logical device volume. For a diskette (floppy) drive, it is defined to be the
entire medium (the term “diskette” includes legacy 3.5” diskette drives as well as newer
media such as the Iomega Zip drive). System Partitions can reside on any medium that is
supported by EFI Boot Services. System Partitions support backward compatibility with
legacy Intel Architecture systems by reserving the first block (sector) of the partition for
compatibility code.
System Table
Table that contains the standard input and output handles for an EFI application, as well
as pointers to the boot services and runtime services tables. It may also contain pointers
to other standard tables such as the ACPI, SMBIOS, and SAL System tables. A loaded
image receives a pointer to its system table when it begins execution. Also called the EFI
System Table.
Task Priority Level (TPL)
The boot services environment exposes three task priority levels: “normal”, “callback”,
and “notify”.
Task Priority Services
The set of functions used to manipulate task priority levels. Includes RaiseTPL() and
RestoreTPL().
TFTP
See Trivial File Transport Protocol.
Time Format
The format for expressing time in an EFI-compliant platform. For more information, see
Appendix A.
Time Services
The set of functions used to manage time. Includes GetTime(), SetTime(),
GetWakeupTime(), and SetWakeupTime().
Timer Services
The set of functions used to manipulate timers. Contains a single function,
SetTimer().
TPL
See Task Priority Level.