[gPXE] generic boot standard virtual drives: interesting andimplementable idea?

[Miller, Shao]

Good day Paul,

In regards to gPXE (or boot-loaders, in general) telling the OS about
virtual/emulated/networked drives to attach:

iSCSI has the iBFT.  A driver can find this and use it to attach.

AoE has the aBFT; same idea.

H. Peter Anvin of the Syslinux boot-loader suite and I are interested in
implementing an "mBFT" for MEMDISK at some point.  I'd like to offer
floppy/ODD/HDD emulation, as well as supporting multiple emulated
drives.  It might be interesting if the "mBFT" contained information for
device-mapper unit setup, too.

Right now, there are WinVBlock and FiraDisk for Windows, if you're
interested.  There's certainly more to be added to those projects.

gPXE's lead developer, Michael Brown, did write a RAM disk driver for
gPXE which is not compiled-in by default.  Theoretically, gPXE could
have the same "mBFT" support that hopefully MEMDISK will have.

By the way, there is a version of MEMDISK which will perform El Torito
emulation and allow you to boot an .ISO image.  Until WinVBlock supports
ODD emulation, the only real use is an OS like DOS, who will use INT
13h.

GRUB4DOS supports El Torito emulation for .ISO RAM disk images, as well.
FiraDisk (again, for Windows) will find and use such an emulated drive.

- Shao Miller