Quick Boot - A Guide for Embedded Firmware Developers

[OCRed version.]

Quick Boot is designed to give developers a background in the basic architecture and details of a typical boot sequence. More specifically, this book describes the basic initialization sequence that allows developers the freedom to boot an OS without a fully featured system BIOS. Various specifications provide the basics of both the code bases and the standards. This book also provides insights into optimization techniques for more advanced developers. With proper background information, the required specifications on hand, and diligence, many developers can create quality boot solutions using this text.

Pete Dice is Engineering Director of Verifone, where he manages OS Engineering teams in Dublin, Ireland and Riga Latvia. Dice successfully launched Intel® Quark™, Intel's first generation SoC as well as invented the Intel® Galileo™ development board and developed a freemium SW strategy to scale Intel IoT gateway features across product lines. He is also credited with architecting the "Moon Island" software stack and business model.

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Booting an Intel architecture platform should be easy. Anyone who thinks that writing an all-purpose Intel'' architecture Basic Input Output System (BIOS) and/or an operating system (aS) boot loader from scratch is easy has yet to try it. The complexity and sheer number of documents and undocumented details about the motherboard and hardware components, operating system requirements, industry standards and exceptions, silicon-specific eccentricities beyond the standards, little-known tribal knowledge, basic configuration. compiler nuances, linker details, and variety of applicable debug tools are enormous. While it can be difficult, it doesn't have to be.