Etherboot

Etherboot is a very popular open-source bootrom project. It contains drivers for many common network cards, and works very well with LTSP.

Linux kernels must be tagged with the mknbi-linux , which will prepare the kernel for network booting, by prefixing the kernel with some additional code, and appending the initrd to the end of the kernel.

The kernels that are supplied with LTSP are already tagged, and ready to boot with Etherboot.

Etherboot can also be written to a floppy, which works great for testing.

PXE

Part of the 'Wired for Management' specification from the late 1990's included a specification for a bootrom technology known as the Pre-boot Execution Environment commonly abreviated as PXE.

A PXE bootrom can load at most a 32 kilo-byte file. A Linux kernel is quite a bit larger than that.

Therefore, we setup PXE to load a 2nd stage boot-loader called pxelinux. pxelinux is small enough to be loaded, and it knows how to load much larger files, such as a Linux kernel.