net booting

[Ben Pfaff]

Does anyone out there have experience with booting a kernel
retrieved via network with DHCP/rarp/tftp/etc.?  In particular,
do you know what network cards do this the most nicely?  I'm
sure I can get it to work--plenty of HOWTOs, etc.--but I don't
know what hardware's the best.

In particular, do you know how well the 3Com Fast Etherlink XL
works for this sort of application?  I believe that these have
net-boot loaders built in.

On the other hand, does anyone know of particularly cheap cards
that do this well?

The card must be 100 Mbps capable because that's the speed of my
hub.

(I want this so that I can do testing of my development kernels
and boot floppies on a spare system without having to copy them
onto a floppy disk, saving about 2 minutes of time on each
test-and-fail cycle.)

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See Figure 1.