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PXE features
![Image of a selection of bootroms](/images/bootroms_web.jpg)
PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) is the predominant standard for network booting on the x86 platform. The facilities provided and required by plain old PXE are somewhat archaic.
The open-source iPXE project provides a free (GPL) implementation of PXE with many enhancements not found in legacy PXE implementations, such as:
- iSCSI boot - the ability to boot an operating system (such as Linux or Microsoft Windows Server 2003) directly from an iSCSI target.
- AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet) boot - the ability to boot an operating system (such as Linux or Microsoft Windows XP) directly from a Coraid Etherdrive NAS.
- HTTP boot - the ability to boot directly from a web server.
- Boot scripts - the ability to write a script to control the network boot process.