I've been trying to use netbooting, both in the context of my work on qemu and in trying to get actual black hardware to boot. In both cases I've had no luck, most of the time the netboot timeouts, and I'll sometimes get some X's and L's thrown in.
Does anyone know what these X's and L's that sometime show up after
"Requesting BOOTP information" mean? I've looked through the Network documentation but it doesn't give any clarification.
We'll need a lot more info on your setup to help you on this. What machine is providing the bootp+tftp+nfs? Have you turned off dhcp on your network? Are you using wifi or ethernet?
The Admin handbook provides plenty of info on what to setup for this, as does the documentation for netbsd/next.
Oh and tcpdump/wireshark is REALLY useful to debug this kind of thing so you can see on the wire what's being transmitted or not.