This is an old revision of the document!
Table of Contents
Download and boot an executable image
Synopsis
boot [<name|uri>] [<arguments>...]
or
imgexec [<name|uri>] [<arguments>...]
or
chain [<name|uri>] [<arguments>...]
Examples
Boot the iPXE demonstration image
boot http://boot.ipxe.org/demo/boot.php
Boot pxelinux
boot pxelinux.0
Boot the currently-selected image
boot
Boot a Linux kernel with an initrd and arguments
imgfetch http://192.168.0.1/initrd.gz boot http://192.168.0.1/vmlinuz vga=788
Description
Download and boot an executable image from the specified URI. Any arguments will be passed directly to the booted image.
If no image is explicitly specified, iPXE will boot the currently-selected image (as reported by the imgstat command).
An image that has already been downloaded (e.g. by the imgfetch command) can be specified by using the image name instead of a URI. For example:
imgfetch http://192.168.0.1/vmlinuz boot vmlinuz
If this command is executed from within an iPXE script, then the URI will be interpreted as being relative to the URI of the script itself. For example, if the script http://boot.ipxe.org/demo/boot.php contains the line
boot pxelinux.0
then iPXE will download and boot http://boot.ipxe.org/demo/pxelinux.0.
Command status
| Success | The image was successfully downloaded and booted, and the image subsequently returned successfully |
|---|---|
| Failure | The image was not successfully downloaded and booted, or the image subsequently returned with an error |
It is unusual for this command to return successfully, since if the boot is successful then control will not return to iPXE.
See also
Notes
The commands boot, imgexec and chain are identical.
Backwards compatibility
In older versions of iPXE, you must use chain when you want to download and boot a new image from a URI, and you must use boot or imgexec when you want to boot an image that has already been downloaded.
To maintain compatibility with existing scripts, you can specify a new name for the image using the deprecated –name option.
