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Booting Linux ISOs with Memdisk and iPXE

· 4 min read
Antony Messerli
Lead Developer

There are a number of distributions out there that provide proper support for booting the distribution over the network. A lot of the more popular distributions usually provide a installer kernels that can be easily downloaded for use. You point at the vmlinuz and the initrd and can them immediately proceed with the install streaming down packages as needed. These distributions make it great for tools like netboot.xyz to install using iPXE.

There are some distributions out there that don't have this functionality and typically only produce the ISO without any repositories that provide installer kernels or the rootfs.

In those cases, occasionally you can use memdisk and iPXE to boot those ISOs but they don't always work. In doing some research, I ran across one of the major issues as to why.