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piPXE is a build of theiPXE network boot firmware for theRaspberry Pi.

1. Downloadsdcard.img and write it onto any blank micro SD cardusing a tool such asdd orEtcher.

2. Insert the micro SD card into your Raspberry Pi.

3. Power on your Raspberry Pi.

Within a few seconds you should see iPXE appear and begin booting fromthe network:

To build from source, clone this repository and runmake. This willbuild all of the required components and eventually generate the SDcard imagesdcard.img.

You will need various build tools installed, including across-compiling version ofgcc for building AArch64 binaries.

Fedora build tools:

sudo dnf install -y binutils gcc gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu \                    git-core iasl libuuid-devel make \                    mtools perl python subversion xz-devel

Ubuntu build tools:

sudo apt install -y build-essential gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu \                    git iasl lzma-dev mtools perl python \                    subversion uuid-dev

The SD card image contains:

• BroadcomVC4 boot firmware:bootcode.bin and related files
• TianoCore EDK2 UEFI firmware built for theRPi3 platform:RPI_EFI.fd
• iPXE built for thearm64-efi platform:/efi/boot/bootaa64.efi

The Raspberry Pi has a somewhat convoluted boot process in which theVC4 GPU is responsible for loading the initial executable ARM CPUcode. The flow of execution is approximately:

1. The GPU code in the onboard boot ROM loadsbootcode.bin from the SD card.
2. The GPU executesbootcode.bin and loadsRPI_EFI.fd from the SD card.
3. The GPU allows the CPU to start executingRPI_EFI.fd.
4. The CPU executesRPI_EFI.fd and loadsbootaa64.efi from the SD card.
5. The CPU executesbootaa64.efi (i.e. iPXE) to boot from the network.

Every component is under an open source licence. See the individualsubproject licensing terms for more details:

• https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/blob/master/boot/LICENCE.broadcom
• https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/master/Readme.md
• https://ipxe.org/licensing