[1] It allows Macintosh computers to boot from bootable images on a network instead of local storage media such as CD, DVD, or hard disk.
The reference implementation of BSDP is Darwin's BOOTP server, which is part of Mac OS's NetBoot feature.
The DHCP server and client send a vendor class option that contains an ASCII-encoded string with three parts delimited by a / character.
If this field is not specified and no storage medium is available locally on the client, then the boot process for Mac OS X is aborted.
The following example illustrates the construction of the Vendor Encapsulated Option: The first field here, 01 01 02, means that the packet is a BSDP "SELECT" message.