[gPXE] gPXE booting an .iso image

Miller, Shao Shao.Miller at yrdsb.edu.on.ca
Fri May 14 18:33:00 EDT 2010


Luca,

There is not really a way to use gPXE -> MEMDISK or any other RAM disk
method to begin running a Linux optical disc distribution image, that I
know of.

For Windows, there are WinVBlock and Firadisk drivers, which
unfortunately don't help you in this situation.

If the distro supports SANs, you could SAN-boot an HDD installation of
the distro.

If the distro can be populated entirely from the initramfs and run
properly from there, you could potentially pack everything up into the
"initrd" (which for modern Linux is no longer an "INITial Ram Disk" at
all, but an archive which is extracted into the initramfs).  I don't
know of any large distros that use this option.

I'd like to code a MEMDISK driver for Linux some day, but that doesn't
help you today, I'm afraid.

- Shao Miller


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