Alpine Linux netboot

Welcome to the Alpine Linux netboot server.

Netboot provides kernel initramfs and modloop images to boot over the network/internet. Booting from netboot is provided by the IPXE binaries available in alpine-ipxe apk add alpine-ipxe or from this location.

Boot script

The default bootscript for alpine-ipxe is https://boot.alpinelinux.org/boot.ipxe which will automatically be fetched by alpine-ipxe. If you like to change this behaviour you will need to build your own version of ipxe.

Some cloud providers (ie packet.net) support the loading of custom ipxe scripts/payloads to install an operating system. You can chainload one of the ipxe loaders from alpine-ipxe. Don't load the boot.ipxe script directly as image verifications will fail.

Images

Images are hosted in the Images directory on boot.alpinelinux.org. Current available images are:

• edge
  • x86
  • x86_64
• latest-stable
  • x86
  • x86_64

Signed images

Alpine Linux images are signed and can be verified only by making use of alpine-ipxe. Using another ipxe loader will not trust our signatures and will result in failed boot.

Boot options

BIOS

• pxe.lkrn - Linux kernel image that can be used by a bootloader/qemu
• pxe.pxe - PXE image for chainloading from a PXE environment
• undionly.kpxe - PXE image with UNDI support
• ipxe.iso - ISO image to boot from any regular system

UEFI

• ipxe.efi x86_64 UEFI executable

Updates

Netboot images are updated every night automatically if any package in the dependecy tree (kernel and alpine-base) has been updated. Regular packages are updated automatically via our package repositories.

Testing netboot

The easiest way to test is by using Qemu directly with the ipxe kernel image.

apk add qemu-system-x86_64 alpine-ipxe

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 512M -enable-kvm -kernel /usr/share/alpine-ipxe/ipxe.lkrn -curses

NOTE: you need a minimum of 256M of memory to boot alpine in network mode due to the size of our initramfs and modloop (kernel modules).