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It probably works the same way that WANboot works on Sun/Oracle SPARC machines:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19683-01/817-5768/wanboo...

There's just enough code to initialize the network interface/s, grab an IP, and download a file from an HTTP/S server. Once the file is downloaded, it's executed and you have the beginnings of a bootstrap procedure for your OS installer.

WANbooting has been around for almost ten years now, so the idea isn't that new.

This was probably even technically possible with PowerPC machines, as they used OpenBoot firmware just like Sun SPARC machines did. I guess they wrote the EFI code necessary to do the same thing.



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