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0 pointsjustincormack14y ago0 comments

Have used tftp for net booting, those legacy bioses cant do anything else, as it really is trivial...

0 comments

Has there been a piece of equipment shipped in the last 10 years that legitimately couldn't get a TCP running to bootstrap itself? That's why TFTP exists: to avoid the need for TCP.

harshreality14y ago

Only tftp is widely supported by embedded ROMs, for netboot or for loading a new firmware for embedded devices with broken OS images.

It's not a matter of getting TCP running. You'd need a basic http transfer client, too. Not many network bootloaders or firmware loaders support anything other than tftp.

iPXE supports http. Get iPXE into embedded bootloaders for new firmware loading, and into network device ROMs for network booting, and then people can switch. Until then, it's tftp because that's what everyone supports.

yuhong14y ago

Well, remember that until recently, BIOSes ran in real mode with it's memory constraints (remember the 640k limit?).

vog14y ago

Indeed. TFTP serves its purpose pretty well. FTP doesn't.

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