gPXE: Modern FOSS Network Booting

Google Tech Talks
August 11, 2008

ABSTRACT

The advent of high-speed wide-area networks, coupled with emerging open standards for attached storage, has enabled relocation of traditional workstation drives to remote datacenter servers and facilitated virtualization of the boot process. It is now possible to load operating systems from remote storage arrays using protocols such as HTTP, iSCSI and AoE, in addition to legacy protocols such as TFTP. In this tutorial we will perform in-depth demonstrations of network booting Linux and Windows servers and workstations from network-based storage using open source software and open protocols.

Speaker: Marty Connor
Marty Connor is Project Leader of the Etherboot Project (http://etherboot.org), a globally distributed team of developers and users of innovative network booting technology. He is the creator and maintainer of the rom-o-matic.net website which dynamically generates custom gPXE and Etherboot network boot images. Mr. Connor is also CEO of Entity Cyber, Inc., a technology consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has advised clients on technology matters for over 20 years.

Speaker: Michael Brown
Michael Brown is the lead developer of the Etherboot Project (http://etherboot.org) and is responsible for its evolution into gPXE, the current state of the art in network booting. He owns an open-source consultancy business, Fen Systems Ltd., and spends most of his time working on improvements to gPXE for customers across the world. He lives in Cambridge, England, and occasionally wonders what it would be like to have more than 64 kilobytes to play with.

Speaker: H. Peter Anvin
H. Peter Anvin has been hacking Linux since 1992. He is the author and maintainer of the SYSLINUX suite of bootloaders, part of the Linux kernel x86 architecture maintainer team, and author or maintainer of a large number of Open Source projects, including the Netwide Assembler, klibc and tftp-hpa.

He is the founder and president of the Linux Kernel Organization, operators of kernel.org, the Linux kernel website. He lives in San Jose, California, and works for rPath, Inc.

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[8givchik8]

В ролике (Скорость загрузки Windows в VirtualBox на Linux (kubuntu 11.04)) четко видно, что Linux победил Windows по всем параметрам. Хотя если из винды выкинуть все лишнее и по разумному переписать дрова, то она будет хорошей платформой для игр (или скупым подобием на Linux). Вот только если игры и вправду перейдут на Sony PlayStation и Xbox то нафиг такая без идейная ОС нужна.

Linux рулит!)

[tubilation]

Absolutely brilliant - just wish the gPXE and iPXE guys would sort out their differences and continue as a winning team.Thank you for this oustanding technology. Keep up the good work !

[maxchock]

Hi,

How u deal with the "computer name" if the disk image is share among multiple diskless PCs??

[snigel4321]

Very interesting indeed.

[stanwu]

感覺RD都是宅男 :P

[Reziiin]

The first YouTube video over 10 minutes that I've watched until the end!

[mikeschuld]

This is mentioned by the developers IN the video... pay attention

[TophatOSx86]

i really enjoy the guy with the "Legalize it" shirt :]

im glad google employees are in on the movement.

[NinjaTTT]

How do you see this project in future to be used practicaly?

I really like the project but I already see this tehnology abused by "them".

They will have the chance to sell services for booting some legal OSes... :)

[nullrouten]

The subject matter is interesting but the presenters need to improve on the presentation skills. I found the pace slow... too much emphasis on humor (that wasn't funny)... and tons of nostalgia, instead of explaining how things worked. Otherwise, yes... I liked it.