4 Jan
2006
4 Jan
'06
11:30 p.m.
In message 43BC4A51.9050203@mc.com you wrote:
A general bootloader question: How much hardware initialization should a bootloader perform for the target OS?
As little as possible, as much as necessary.
I see a minimal memory controller setup to allow subsequent loading of an OS image. ECC might also be setup but all remaining resources would typically be setup by the OS.
Right.
Although I haven't tried booting Linux (we boot the vxworks bootrom), does an embedded Linux make any assumptions about what the bootloader initializes?
Yes. Depending on architecture and kernel versions certain parameters (ATAGs, bd_info structure, OF tree, whatever) have to be initialized and passed to the kernel.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
--
Software Engineering: Embedded and Realtime Systems, Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd@denx.de
Digital computers are themselves more complex than most things people
build: They have very large numbers of states. This makes conceiving,
describing, and testing them hard. Software systems have orders-of-
magnitude more states than computers do. - Fred Brooks, Jr.