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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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11 years ago

what is u-boot?

Hello All,

What is Altera U-boot? Searched the web, found how to do, but not what is it... Could someone give a short description what is u-boot or refer me to a good resource, which explains this, on the web?

Thank you

10 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    11 years ago

    U-Boot is a open source universal boot loader. Here's a wiki on it:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/das_u-boot

    It is very popular in the embedded space, and is used as the primary bootloader kind of like "GRUB" PC linux world.

    It has Ethernet capabilities, so it can also boot the hardware over the network via tftp etc.

    Pete
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    the DS-5 having a capability to allow user to debug the application via Ethernet, but is in SSH connection, where it called RSE....

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    --- Quote Start ---

    Hello All,

    What is Altera U-boot? Searched the web, found how to do, but not what is it... Could someone give a short description what is u-boot or refer me to a good resource, which explains this, on the web?

    Thank you

    --- Quote End ---

    Not sure which part are you referring, if in arria 5 or cyclone V, the uboot is something nearer to the linux OS for start up, where there is another part called pre-loader is nearer to the hardware/ FGPA.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    Hi,

    uboot is described in total from a key part of its developers in [1].

    For booting it is TFTP with combination of maybe NFS for the filesystem.

    You just have to plug in an ethernet-cable and set the ip address and server ip in the environment (and of course have a corresponding TFTP-Server/NFS-Server in the net).

    [1] http://www.denx.de/wiki/u-boot
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    Hi Dmitry, actually what do you know to do with this item? as you were just asking for definition. are you writing Linux thesis?

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    Thanks to All! Actually I'm FPGA Engineer, not an Embedded one... Just tried helping to our Embedded engineer which is also not so familiar with Linux environment... Thanks again!

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    10 years ago

    I see. There us more detail information you can get from Google search. As this term is commonly used in linux programming.