[gPXE-devel] gpxe VNC and RDP support

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

A pure software IP KVM would be neat and several people have thought
about it.  Here's my take.

It depends on the level of remote display support you want:

1. Text mode bootloader interaction over telnet or SSL telnet.  This
is doable by hooking the necessary BIOS interrupts, similar to what
gPXE does for iSCSI/AoE today.  Once the protected-mode OS
(Windows/Linux) starts, you will not be able to access
screen/keyboard.  gPXE does not have TCP listen support, but it could
connect to a waiting netcat instance on your machine.

2. Text mode BIOS Setup from a gPXE ROM.  The gPXE ROM will be called
by the BIOS early during boot and might be able to hook in just like
in point #1 above.  It's possible that this would work for some but
don't count on it working for all BIOSes since there will be quirks
and incompatibilities.

3. Anything involving graphics or interacting with protected-mode
operating systems is much bigger and probably requires virtualization
techniques in order to catch screen/keyboard I/O.  I feel this sort of
code does not fit into the gPXE codebase, it's out-of-scope especially
for fitting in a boot ROM.

Stefan