Previous chapters have made reference to and even provided examples of
bootloader operations. A critical component of an embedded system, the
bootloader provides the foundation from which the other system software is
spawned. This chapter starts by examining the bootloader’s role in a system. We
follow this with an introduction to some common features of bootloaders.
Armed with this background, we take a detailed look at a popular bootloader
used for embedded systems. We conclude this chapter by introducing a few of
the more popular bootloaders.
Numerous bootloaders are in use today. It would be impractical in the given
space to cover much detail on even the most popular ones. Therefore, we have
chosen to explain concepts and use examples based on one of the more popular
bootloaders in the open source community for PowerPC, MIPS, ARM, and other
architectures: the U-Boot bootloader. |