You're reading from Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition

Product typeBook

Published inMay 2021

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781789530384

Edition3rd Edition

Concepts

Embedded Systems

Authors (2):

Frank Vasquez

Chris Simmonds

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Booting the kernel

Booting Linux is highly device-dependent. In this section, I will show you how it works for the Raspberry Pi 4, BeagleBone Black, and QEMU. For other target boards, you must consult the information from the vendor or from the community project, if there is one.

At this point, you should have the kernel image files and the device tree blobs for the Raspberry Pi 4, BeagleBone Black, and QEMU.

Booting the Raspberry Pi 4

Raspberry Pis use a proprietary bootloader provided by Broadcom instead of U-Boot. Unlike previous Raspberry Pi models, the Raspberry Pi 4's bootloader resides on an onboard SPI EEPROM rather than on a microSD card. We still need to put the kernel image and device tree blobs for the Raspberry Pi 4 on a microSD to boot our 64-bit kernel.

To begin, you need a microSD card with a FAT32 boot partition large enough to hold the necessary kernel build artifacts. The boot partition needs to be the first partition on the microSD card. A partition...

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Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition

Published in: May 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781789530384

Authors (2)

Frank Vasquez

Frank Vasquez is an independent software consultant specializing in consumer electronics. He has over a decade of experience designing and building embedded Linux systems. During that time, he has shipped numerous devices including a rackmount DSP audio server, a diver-held sonar camcorder, and a consumer IoT hotspot. Before his career as an embedded Linux engineer, Frank was a database kernel developer at IBM where he worked on DB2. He lives in Silicon Valley.
Read more about Frank Vasquez

Chris Simmonds

Chris Simmonds is a software consultant and trainer living in southern England. He has almost two decades of experience in designing and building open-source embedded systems. He is the founder and chief consultant at 2net Ltd, which provides professional training and mentoring services in embedded Linux, Linux device drivers, and Android platform development. He has trained engineers at many of the biggest companies in the embedded world, including ARM, Qualcomm, Intel, Ericsson, and General Dynamics. He is a frequent presenter at open source and embedded conferences, including the Embedded Linux Conference and Embedded World.
Read more about Chris Simmonds

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