2. Characteristics of Etherboot

For an introduction to Etherboot from the user perspective you may wish to read the User Manual first.

In order to understand Etherboot development, it is necessary to first understand how Etherboot differs from normal application programs.

1. Etherboot runs as a standalone program, not under an operating system. The only services it relies on are those provided by the BIOS of the motherboard.
2. It has complete access to the "bare metal" of the machine.
3. It needs to have as small a memory footprint as practicable, in order to maximise the amount of memory available to the code that it loads.