• gPXE Image types: explanation on types of images cranked out by make or r-o-m

Many parts of the gPXE code-base include commenting for use with the Doxygen system. To build this documentation for browsing, go into gPXE src/ directory and do

make doc

You will then have the documentation available in your gpxe/src/bin/doc/ directory.

A sample build is available here.

• Introduction: A typical network boot scenario, including explanations for new users
• Troubleshooting FAQ
• EtherBoot image types explanation
• How to specify which boot file to load
• gPXE command line reference

• Burning ROM chips
  • More specific: for Realtek 8139 NICs
• Putting EtherBoot into your BIOS

• Using LILO with EtherBoot
• PXELINUX

• Using EtherBoot as a PXE boot rom
• Using EtherBoot as a PXE 2nd-stage-loader

• How to use EtherBoot in a VMware virtual machine
• How to use EtherBoot as ROM in the VMware BIOS / EtherBoot ROM in VMware and Bochs network cards
• How to use EtherBoot with Bochs
• How to use gPXE with QEMU

• Booting Memdisk
  • Diskless MS-DOS (and compatibles)
  • Diskless Windows 98

• Loading EtherBoot from a Windows 2000/XP NT loader
• Using EtherBoot with Microsofts Remote Installation Services (RIS)

• Booting FreeBSD

• ATA-over-Ethernet (experimental)
• Having more than one DHCP-server on a network
• Multicast protocol support (slam/tftp-multicast)
• Experimental SafeBootMode cryptographic boot image check
• Dumping PCI expansion ROMs

Network Bootable Image format (NBI) is a legacy format that wraps operating system images (such as Linux kernels) in a wrapper, which makes it possible for Etherboot to load the images directly. The “mknbi” (make NBI) utility performs the wrapping operation.

Unfortunately, mknbi cannot be used to make a NBI of a Linux 2.6 (or newer) kernel image. If you are tied to Etherboot but need to boot a Linux 2.6 or newer kernel, wraplinux must be used to create a working NBI. Follow the link to wraplinux on kernel.org to download it.

Note: This is not needed for PXE and PXELINUX booting, and is not recommended for new users. For new users, we recommend using PXELINUX

For those who need to use the NBI format, please see:

• mknbi utility description and manpage

• gPXE Network Driver API
• PCI, network driver, and non-volatile storage APIs

• GDB remote debugging
• Prefix debugging
• Function recorder for crash/hang debugging

• A somewhat dated Etherboot Developers' manual (does not cover recent versions of Etherboot, or gPXE)
• A Developer To-Do List