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.

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

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

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.

• 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

• ipxe.efi x86_64 UEFI executable

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.

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).