iPXE is an open-source network boot firmware that provides a full PXE implementation with enhanced capabilities. It operates as a pre-boot environment, replacing or supplementing traditional BIOS/UEFI PXE ROMs. The firmware supports booting over HTTP/HTTPS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), AoE, InfiniBand, and wireless networks, with full TLS 1.2 support including modern cipher suites (ECDHE, GCM, X25519, P-256/P-384). It includes a built-in command-line shell, scripting engine, interactive menus, and extensive hardware drivers for network cards, USB controllers, and storage devices across x86, ARM, RISC-V, LoongArch, and s390x architectures. The architecture is modular and table-driven: drivers, protocols, commands, and startup functions are registered via compile-time tables (e.g., `__pci_driver`, `__net_protocol`, `__command`), enabling a highly configurable build. The core uses an interface/refcount pattern for object-oriented-like composition, with reference-counted objects and asynchronous data transfer via `struct interface`. The codebase is well-structured with clear separation between architecture-specific code (under `src/arch/`), platform interfaces (EFI, BIOS, Linux userspace, SBI), and generic core logic. A comprehensive test suite (over 50 unit tests plus Wycheproof vectors) validates cryptographic primitives, network protocols, and data structures. Key entry points include `src/core/main.c` (generic boot flow), EFI application entry (`efiprefix.c`), BIOS PXE ROM entry, and Linux userspace binary. The firmware is typically embedded into option ROMs, UEFI drivers, or bootable images. External dependencies are minimal—the firmware runs directly on hardware or under a hypervisor, relying only on platform firmware services (UEFI, BIOS, SBI) for low-level operations.
Khue's Homelab is a GitOps-driven infrastructure-as-code framework that automates a complete self-hosted Kubernetes platform from bare metal to user-facing applications. The codebase is organized into five layers: metal (Ansible roles that PXE-boot Fedora Server, bootstrap a k3s cluster with kube-vip HA, and install Cilium for networking/load balancing), system (bootstrap Helm charts for ArgoCD, cert-manager, ingress-nginx, Rook Ceph, and monitoring), platform (Gitea, Woodpecker CI, Grafana, Kanidm identity, Dex SSO, zot container registry), apps (Jellyfin + the *arr stack, Matrix, Paperless, Ollama, and more), and external (Terraform-managed Cloudflare DNS, tunnel, and ntfy alerting). ArgoCD ApplicationSets watch the git repository and deploy every Helm chart, making the repo itself the source of truth; a single top-level `make` drives the entire pipeline. The project demonstrates strong IaC craftsmanship: idempotent Ansible roles with checksum-verified downloads and run_once state handling (k3s token genesis, kubeconfig extraction), an ephemeral PXE server with per-MAC kickstart files and DHCP-proxy mode, declarative random secret generation via a small Go tool combined with the External Secrets Operator for cross-namespace secret sync, and a Terraform module that creates least-privilege Cloudflare API tokens injected directly into the cluster. It also includes a Nix dev shell for reproducible tooling, pre-commit hooks, Woodpecker CI that renders Helm diffs on pull requests, and Terratest-based smoke/integration/version tests. The author explicitly labels the project ALPHA and recommends forking for personal use. It is best treated as a reference architecture and a collection of reusable provisioning patterns rather than a turnkey product; some portions (scripts/hacks, take-screenshots, the gitea config job) are acknowledged work-in-progress, and a few pinned versions lag the ecosystem (Go 1.19 in-cluster compile jobs, k3s 1.30, several stale container image tags).