[ipxe-devel] ROM BIOS booting

[Michael Brown]

On Wednesday 14 Sep 2011 19:58:38 troll greenЪ wrote:
> Good day,
> I made some pci board with ROM BIOS (iPXE and some script for authorization
> before boot, etc.)
> Can I booting with iPXE not from network but from memory in my board.
> i.e. how can I do something like this
> 
> >kernel ./boot/linux
> >initrd ./boot/initrd.gz
> >boot
> 
> (share some onboard memory to iPXE)
> 
> Maybe it's stupid question.
> But what can I use when IP, UDP, BOOTP and TFTP isn't good solution.

iPXE is designed to be a network bootloader.  You could potentially coerce it 
into using a kernel and initrd that are already in memory somewhere (by 
writing extra code that manually registers the images), but it really isn't 
designed to be used that way.

Where are the kernel and initrd images coming from, if not over the network?  
It sounds as though you must have them in some kind of non-volatile mass 
storage device (e.g. a flash drive), in which case you probably want to use a 
bootloader such as grub or lilo.

Michael