iPXE is the leading open source network boot firmware. It provides a full PXE implementation enhanced with additional features such as:
- boot from a web server via HTTP
- boot from an iSCSI SAN
- boot from a Fibre Channel SAN via FCoE
- boot from an AoE SAN
- boot from a wireless network
- boot from a wide-area network
- boot from an Infiniband network
- control the boot process with a script
You can use iPXE to replace the existing PXE ROM on your network card, or you can chainload into iPXE to obtain the features of iPXE without the hassle of reflashing.
iPXE is free, open-source software licensed under the GNU GPL (with some portions under GPL-compatible licences), and is included in products from several network card manufacturers and OEMs.
Network booting is cool. Once you have setup everything you can stop juggling iso images in your virtual machine configs. Instead you just kick a network boot and pick whatever you want install from the boot menu delivered by the boot server.
This article is not about the basics of setting up a boot server. The internet has tons of tutorials on how to install a tftp server and how to boot your favorite OS from tftp. This article will focus on configuring network boot for libvirt-managed virtual machines.
These instructions will walk you through booting Container Linux via iPXE on real or virtual hardware. By default, this will run Container Linux completely out of RAM. Container Linux can also be installed to disk.
A mininum of 1024M of RAM is required to boot Container Linux via PXE.