With initrd (which is included in Linux 2.0), it could be made to work
for diskless stations quite nicely. initrd is actually always an
advanced option for more customized setups.
For plain bootpd-based boots this is actually probably not
needed as Linux 2.0 contains also the option to use BOOTP instead of
RARP. (To be more precise, you can compile both in the kernel, and the
faster response wins.)
There is a patch floating around that allows for swapping over
NFS. It was sent to me (during a private high workload phase), but I
somehow managed to lose the mail.
