This presentation is a practical guide to implementing U-Boot bootloader port to a new system from scratch. At the beginning, two main pilars of contemporary U-Boot, device tree (DT) support and driver model (DM), are explained. This is followed by an in-depth look at the crucial subsystems, clock, pinmux, serial, block and a few other commonly used ones. Finally, systems with limited resources and multi-stage booting is discussed. The talk includes examples and experiences from platforms recently added to mainline U-Boot.
This presentation is a practical guide to implementing U-Boot port to a new system from scratch. U-Boot is the de-facto standard bootloader for embedded systems, there is plenty of U-Boot ports, yet vast majority of those are implemented in sub-optimal way. This talk first explains the U-Boot internals, the driver model (DM) and it's interaction with device tree (DT), as understanding these is vital to understanding the implementation of core subsystems. The core subsystems are explained in detail afterward to allow developers implement drivers the intended way without hacks and workarounds. Unfortunately, not all systems have plenty of resources, but U-Boot caters for those as well. The final part of the talk discusses the U-Boot SPL, the preloader which initializes the hardware, DRAM and starts U-Boot and finer parts of this procedure, which tends to have plenty of pitfalls.
Speakers: Marek Vasut