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+PXE is a standard for network booting of a machine that leverages
+DHCP, TFTP, and a specialized bootloader.
+
+It is possible to PXE boot a guest in Palacios in one of two ways. First,
+the BIOS and/or virtual NIC firmware you use may directly support it.
+The second option is to boot a tiny image that contains a PXE boot
+engine, which is what is described here.
+
+This technique was developed by Chen Kin, Bharath Pattabiraman,
+and Patrick Foley during EECS 441 at Northwestern.
+
+The Etherboot/gPXE project (http://etherboot.org/wiki/index.php) has
+created a PXE boot engine that can be compiled into a variety of
+forms (firmware, isos, etc). You can use rom-o-matic to create a custom
+iso image: http://rom-o-matic.net/gpxe/gpxe-1.0.1/contrib/rom-o-matic/
+
+In this directory, the file gpxe-1.0.1-gpxe.iso is one such custom
+iso image, one that includes all available NIC drivers. The file
+gpxe.pal is an example of how to use such an image (the same as
+any other bootable CD image).
+
+In addition to booting from gpxe, your guest configuration must include
+a NIC that gpxe can drive, and that NIC needs to attached to a network
+on which the PXE server can be found. One approach is to use
+a passthrough device. The following maps an NE2000 NIC available on
+the host into the VM:
+
+ <device id="PCI_PASSTHROUGH" name="ne2k">
+ <bus>pci0</bus>
+ <vendor_id>0x10EC</vendor_id>
+ <device_id>0x8029</device_id>
+ <irq>50</irq>
+ </device>
+
+Another possibility is to map a virtual NIC and bridge to a physical
+NIC:
+
+<device class="RTL8319" id="rtl8139">
+ <mac>MACADDR</mac>
+ <bus>PCI_BUS_ID</bus>
+</device>
+
+<device class="NIC_BRIDGE" id="nic_bridge">
+ <frontend tag="rtl8139" />
+ <hostnic name="eth0" />
+</device>
+
+A third possibility is to map a virtual NIC and bridge it to VNET.
+See the technical report for more information on this.
+
+Note that more recent versions of gpxe (1.0.1+) include support for
+the paravirtualized virtio-nic. This is probably the kind of NIC you
+want to use.
+
+Configuring a PXE server is outside the scope of this document, but
+a related document available from our web site describes how to do so
+to support PXE-based Kitten/Palacios development.
