Alpine Linux netboot

Welcome to the Alpine Linux netboot server.

This netboot server provides a boot script and image signatures to securly boot Alpine Linux over the internet. To be able to boot you will need to have a copy of the iPXE bootloader available. You can get a copy of the bootloaders by installing alpine-ipxe apk add alpine-ipxe or from this location (only x86_64).

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 Equinix Metal) support the loading of custom ipxe scripts/payloads to install an operating system. You can chainload one of the ipxe bootloaders from alpine-ipxe. Loading our boot script from another bootloader will disable image verification.

Images

NOTE: since Alpine v3.8 this netboot server does not provide images anymore. You can find netboot images in the release directories on our mirrors.

Signed images

Alpine Linux images are signed and can be verified only by making use of alpine-ipxe. Using another ipxe bootloader will disable verification.

Boot options

BIOS (x86_64)

• 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.usb - disk image to write to (USB) block device

UEFI (x86_64)

• ipxe.efi UEFI executable

UEFI (aarch64)

• snp.efi UEFI executable

Updates

Currently we only support latest stable releases. We are working on adding montly edge snapshots.

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).