> I think the abbreviation stands for "Pre-eXecution Environment" (?).
> I don't really know the exact details of what it does, but apparently
> it gives you the ability to use "BIOS" (?) functions to speak to the
> network card in a hardware-independent manner, thus allowing network
> the actual physical NIC hardware.

 Sounds exactly like what Motorola, Apple, Intel and others wanted to
implement years ago when Openfirmware came up. Hardware and platform
independant code to "talk" between your board, graphic board, network
cards and more. It would even be possible to write hardware independant
drivers for that and just about every operating system would have at least
the OFW-driver from start-of-sales and later on an optimized one.

 Sorry, OT, but very interessting.

Markus Illenseer