Foreword

As early as 2023 I began exploring diskless booting. At first I noticed the PXE network boot option in the motherboard BIOS and became very curious about what it could do. Searching online led me to practical solutions like PXE bulk deployment. In 2025 I came across an IBM server and accidentally saw an iSCSI Target configuration entry in the BIOS. I had already studied iSCSI on my NAS — it can share a disk as a block device, and after mounting it you get an experience identical to a local disk. Since I had found iSCSI inside an enterprise server’s BIOS, wouldn’t it be possible to boot an operating system directly from an iSCSI disk? Enterprise-grade hardware certainly has comprehensive capabilities.

Although I didn’t have the chance to investigate deeply on that server at the time, I realised something: if diskless booting were only accessible on enterprise hardware, then the approach clearly lacks universal applicability.

Unfortunately, most technical explorations of diskless booting on the internet are fragmentary, lacking an open-source solution that has been fully verified end‑to‑end. What you find on the market are mostly commercial black‑box products that are not suitable for tinkering and learning. Later on Bilibili I saw a content creator successfully boot ESXi using iPXE. Even though he hadn’t fully figured out the boot flow for other operating systems either, it showed me that the open‑source community was making an effort in the diskless boot space — at least there were already projects paving the way.

Over the following year I intermittently studied the iPXE project. However, iPXE’s official documentation does not provide deployment guides as detailed as those of the Kubernetes community, which made me wonder: can iPXE diskless boot truly work? Despite this I still carried out extensive experiments, orchestrating the environment that iPXE depends on with Docker Compose and publishing it as the open-source project ipxe-netboot-stack-docker. But Docker orchestration alone couldn’t solve the black‑box nature of the iPXE boot chain itself, and the project stalled for a while.

In early July 2026 I made up my mind to thoroughly conquer iPXE diskless booting, even if all I was facing was chaos. But I wasn’t afraid. I had already cracked the completely undocumented “Mingkong Chuangneng” MKC3568 development board (based on the RK3568 SoC), migrated an ARM Feiniu OS system to boot from NVMe, and reverse‑engineered the Feiniu storage stack. Since I had already forged a path through so many dead ends before, iPXE shouldn’t become a roadblock that stops me. So I officially renamed the ipxe-netboot-stack-docker project to iPXE-All-Ready — a name that means “all sorted, everything ready” — vowing to completely clear away every obstacle on the road to iPXE diskless booting.

With the collaboration of AI assistants like Qwen, Codex, and DeepSeek, a major breakthrough was finally achieved with Debian diskless booting. I pressed the advantage and launched an assault on Ubuntu and Windows. On 15 July 2026, Phase 1 was fully wrapped up. iPXE diskless boot is no longer black magic.

Next, Phases 2, 3, and 4 are waiting for us to conquer. The beginning is always the hardest, but the hardest opening has already been torn open by us. We have the confidence and the capability to accomplish one goal after another.

What are those who make history like? We don't know, but today, we are becoming them.