What is Boot Service Discovery Protocol?

Boot Service Discovery Protocol is an Apple-developed, standards-conforming extension of DHCP. 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 DHCP options used are the "vendor-specific information" option and the "vendor class identifier" option.There are three versions of BSDP, though usually version 1.0 is used. All versions enable a client to choose from several bootable images offered by a server.The reference implementation of BSDP is Darwin's BOOTP server, which is part of Mac OS's NetBoot feature.