Minimizing boot times using U-Boot "Falcon" mode

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Information on this media

Number of views:

72 (this month: 1)

Creation date:

July 12, 2012

Speakers:

Stefano Babic / Wolfgang Denk

License:

CC BY SA v2

Description

Résumé

Boot loaders for embedded systems have to meet a number of contradictory requirements : they shall be powerful and flexible tools for board bringup, software development, software updates, diagnose etc., but they shall also be small and be able to boot into application code as fast as possible.

We show how this dilemma has been addressed in recent versions of U-Boot : using the "Falcon" boot method we can switch between production mode which is targeted for minimal startup times, and development mode, where all the powerful capabilities of U-Boot are available.

We will demonstrate this on a system booting from (relatively slow) NAND flash, which needs less than 4 seconds from power-on to launch a QtE based graphical user space application, using only mainline code and a real-life configuration without any tricky optimizations.

Biographie

Wolfgang Denk started the project that is now known as the U-Boot boot loader some 12 years ago, and has been it’s lead maintainer since.

He is the founder of DENX Software Engineering, whose team is also known for contributing to a number of other Free Software Projects including the Linux kernel, Xenomai, or ELDK.