Industry Expert Blogs

Finally, nine months after the next-generation SoC project was kicked off, the first prototype board has finally arrived! There are just six months left to get Android and Linux up and running. Since Android should take full advantage of the latest hardware additions, let’s make sure we get it ported as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, it is not that easy. Before you can care about porting your OS and developing the drivers for your special hardware, you have to deal with the boring, but necessary initialization of the hardware. This is typically done by a so-called boot monitor. A boot monitor is a software program in ROM that gets launched after pressing the power-on button on your hardware.  Even though the boot monitor is not a large piece of software (compared to the OS etc.), it provides complex functions and interacts with many hardware peripherals. As an example, the classic minimal functions of a boot loader are given below:

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