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How does PXE booting work?

April 26, 2017booting PXE

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How does PXE booting work?

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First, it is wise to understand how OpenBSD boots on i386 and amd64 platforms. Upon starting the boot process, the PXE-capable NIC broadcasts a DHCP request over the network. The DHCP server will assign the adapter an IP address, and gives it the name of a file to be retrieved from a tftp(1) server and executed. This file then conducts the rest of the boot process. For OpenBSD, the file is pxeboot, which takes the place of the standard boot(8) file. pxeboot(8) is then able to load and execute a kernel (such as bsd or bsd.rd) from the same tftp(1) server.