Patent ID: 7275152

Claim:
A method, comprising: transmitting a boot server discovery request onto a network; receiving an acknowledgement in response to the boot server discovery request, the acknowledgement indicating a size of a block of data having a boot agent and a boot image to be transmitted to a processing system; pre-posting a buffer in system memory having a size based on the size of the block of data indicated in the acknowledgement, wherein the boot agent and the boot image are buffered in the buffer upon receipt at the processing system; receiving a plurality of data packets by a processing system via a network during a pre-boot runtime of the processing system, each of the plurality of data packets containing one of a corresponding plurality of data segments of a boot agent and a boot image, wherein the boot agent and the boot image are received at the processing system together as the block of data; parsing the plurality of data packets using a network protocol stack to receive the boot agent and the boot image during the pre-boot runtime, a portion of the network protocol stack executed in a hardware entity of the processing system using one or more network protocol offload engines during the pre-boot runtime; transferring the boot agent and the boot image into system memory of the processing system during the pre-boot runtime; executing the boot agent; branching into the boot image from the boot agent to initialize an operating system embedded within the boot image; and executing the operating system.