Table of Contents
AoE - ATA over Ethernet
Classic/“normal” Operating systems, like:
- many Linux releases
- DOS
- Windows 1.0 - 3.11
- Windows 9x
…just need the Interrupt 13 to run and to do file operations, such as:
- loading Operating system components and booting the Operating System itself
- writing log files
- reading settings
- loading drivers
- …
So, the EtherBoot currently supported protocols:
- TFTP
- FSP
- NFS
- HTTP
provide a certain environment level, which is adequate and sufficient to boot the operating systems mentioned above.
New Operating systems, like Windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003 require a more in-depth hard disk environment.
In contrast to the default EtherBoot supported protocols the ATA over Ethernet specification additionally provides/emulates all necessary components for Operating Systems which require an in-depth hard disk / hard disk controller environment[…]
Chart / Diagram
Directory or hard disk (or hard disk image) containg an installed Operating System
|
AoE Server
|
|
| ⇐ network connection
|
|
Client
|
EtherBoot binary with AoE support
|
Boot priority set to "EtherBoot" in the BIOS setup menu
|
EtherBoot with AoE support will be used as boot device
|
EtherBoot with AoE support provides in-depth hard disk environment and loads the Operating System from the harddisk from the AoE Server.
AoE server applications for Linux/Unix
AoE server applications for Windows/DOS
…article will be continued
AoE state of development in EtherBoot
zpxe files have been handed out to demonstrate successful AoE boot. A RTL8139.zpxe demo file has been published by Michael Brown. A prebuilt Fedora 5 hard disk image can also be downloaded.
To get you started, retrieve those files (you will need a RTL8139 card in the client). Setup DHCP reasonably (so the .zpxe file will be loaded). Download the virtual hard drive blade server (or use a real AoE capable drive, of course).
Running
vbladed 0 0 eth0 aoedemo.img
you should be able to boot the client into Fedora.
This is proof-of-concept only, and the code is only in developer codetree yet.