EtherBoot diskless boot support

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(Last updated: Mar. 27, 2000)

Etherboot is a free software package for booting x86 PCs over a network. In principle this could be any network technology that TCP/IP runs on that supports broadcasting. In practice, the bandwidth required means it's only practical over LANs and some WANs. Etherboot is useful for booting PCs diskless. This is desirable in various situations, for example:

Maintaining software for a cluster of equally configured workstations centrally.
A low-cost X-terminal.
A low cost user platform where remote partitions are mounted by NFS and you are willing to accept the slowness of data transfers that results from NFS, compared to a local disk.
Various kinds of remote servers, e.g. a tape drive server that can be accessed with the RMT protocol.
Routers.
Machines doing tasks in environments unfriendly to disks.

Normally Etherboot is used to load Linux, FreeBSD, or DOS. However the protocol and boot file formats are general, so there is no reason why it could not be used to load arbitrary images to a PC, including other OSes.

The components needed by Etherboot are:

A bootstrap loader, usually in an EPROM on a NIC card, but could be put anywhere in the address space the BIOS probes in. For testing this could be put on a floppy disk. Some booting setups may even be always run from a floppy disk (e.g. temporary setups for testing or pedagogic purposes).
A bootp or DHCP server, for handing out IP addresses and other information when sent a MAC (Ethernet card) address.
A tftp server, for sending the kernel images and other files required in the boot process.
A NFS server, for providing the disk partitions that will be mounted if Linux or FreeBSD is being booted.
A Linux or FreeBSD kernel that has been configured to mount the root partition via NFS.
Optionally, compiled-in support for mounting a swap partition via NFS. This feature is not in the stock 2.[02].x Linux kernels; you have to apply the contributed patches for NFS swap.

The Etherboot web site provides downloadable source for Etherboot, plus documentation and extensive reference information.

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