booting from disk image

[Albert Max Lai]

What I am interested in doing is to boot a dos disk image via
tftp.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to boot an image by dd'ing to read in the
bootable dos floppy. This seems to be close but not quite there. I am
able to chainload the boot loader. However, after the boot loader
loads, the subsequent I/O calls look at the floppy drive. What would
be nice is to map the I/O calls to the image that was just
bootstrapped. Are there any reasons why this can't be done? I know
that etherboot and netboot are able to do this with netboot images
(which seem to have some assembly code to patch the bios at the
beginning of the images.)

Another way that I have thought up would be to use netboot images
inside of grub. This is less ideal since it would require having to
use mknbi to generate the images. From what I see, GRUB does not
support this either.

Is anyone currently working on either of these approaches? Thanks.

-Albert