Desktop people are used to having a menu with possible boot entries presented during boot. For some reason embedded bootloaders dropped the concept of boot entries in favor of a flexible but board specific environment. This made installation of a general-purpose distribution a highly board specific task. The freedesktop.org bootloader specification aims at making it possible for the distribution to make itself bootable. This will give control over the boot process back to the distributions. In this talk Sascha Hauer will give an overview about the efforts made in barebox to implement this specification and the special design considerations needed in embedded systems. Other topics include how devicetree is used in barebox to avoid bord specific code and the newly introduced multiboard support which was promised last year at the ELCE.
Sascha Hauer is working as a kernel developer at Pengutronix, Germany. In his day job he is porting Linux to various embedded systems, mostly Freescale i.MX. Being frustratedby the limitations of current bootloaders he forked U-Boot in 2007.
