The talk starts with a short introduction of the Barebox bootloader. Recently, barebox gained several new features: one of the most prominent is multi image support with full initialization from the open firmware device tree. Using this method, it is now possible to generate bootloader binaries for a whole family of devices, just by writing an open firmware device tree. Porting Linux to new hardware has never been so easy.
Other new features include support for the freedesktop.org bootspec: This method to define "boot target" makes it much easier to realize redundancy-boot setups and in-system upgrade mechanisms for industrial devices. For community hardware, the bootspec makes it quite easy to boot standard distributions without taking care of all the ARM specialties.
Speakers: Robert Schwebel