NetBoot is built as a MultiBoot-compliant operating system; therefore to boot it with LILO or the BSD boot program, an appropriate image must be made with mklinuximage or mkbsdimage, respectively (see Section 1.6.2).
NetBoot boots MultiBoot-compliant operating systems such as the example programs that come with the OSKit. If the desired OS to boot needs MultiBoot boot-modules, they and the OS can be combined into one MultiBoot image via the mkmbimage script included with the OSKit.
NetBoot requires a BOOTP server to be running on the local network in order to obtain the IP address, gateway address, netmask, and hostname of the host it runs on. If no BOOTP server responds when NetBoot is booted, it will ask to retry or exit.
The files that NetBoot fetches and boots must reside in a directory that is NFS exported to the host running NetBoot. In the future, NetBoot may support other protocols such as TFTP.
The OS that NetBoot will not know about all of memory. This is because NetBoot stashes itself and some other things at the top of memory and then lies to the booted OS about where the top is. This is to allow the booted OS to return control to NetBoot upon exit; avoiding the time-consuming process of rebooting the machine. There is currently no way to disable this feature.