[toast0]

If you get (i)pxe running, you can chain to https://netboot.xyz/ which lets you boot lots of open source stuff.

It's a bit of a mixed bag, because pxe environments have a way of not always being useful. On bios boot, there's tools from isolinux to memory load disk images and hook the bios calls... but if your OS of choice doesn't use bios calls for storage, it needs a driver that can find the disk image in memory.

For uefi boot, there's not a good way to do this, supposedly some uefi environments can load disk images from the network, but afaik, it's not something you can do from ipxe. Instead, for UEFI, the netboot.xyz folks have some other approaches; typically fetching the kernel and initrd separately or otherwise repackaging things rather than using official ISO images.

And I've run into lots of cases where while pxe seems to work, maybe the keyboard doesn't work in pxe, or something else doesn't get properly initialized and you end up having a better time if you give up and boot from USB.

[westurner]

System Rescue CD and Clonezilla are PXE-bootable.

"OneFileLinux: A 20MB Alpine metadistro that fits into the ESP" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40915199 :

> Ventoy, signed EFIstubs, USI, UKI

TIL about https://netboot.xyz/