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Systemd Adding The Ability to Boot Directly Into A Disk Image Downloaded Via HTTP
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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I'm surprised existing systems weren't mentioned.
Booting from the network has been a thing since the 80s and is now standardized, I guess the main 'new' thing here is using https instead of tftp
Speaking from personal experience, tftp is a terrible protocol so I'm here for it. A lot of tftp's terribleness is due to the simplicity of the protocol in general and it can be forgiven for that since it makes implementing a tftp server/client on marginal hardware really easy. Pre-boot environments are powerful enough now that I think we can use something a bit better.
Modern UEFI in boxes has http boot options generally, and ipxe has supported http boot a long time. though I still get the grub2 bootloader bits over tftp, then http for kernel and initrd.