+++ Liberty Young [04-02-13 12:59 -0700]: > The company I currently work for is interested in breaking into the ARM > market. We're just wondering if anybody out there as advice or > recommendations for ARM software. One of the biggest hurdles we face > that have previously kept us in the x86 market was the BIOS. There are > those who tell me that Linux-arm has bootloaders, such as brog, that can > allow one to quickly make a BIOS/Linux-bootloader within a few weeks! > I'm dubious of such claims, and I was wondering what the people on this > list use for their BIOS, and how long does it typically take to produce > a working BIOS for their ARM products that can boot Linux.
There are plenty of arm bootloaders. I did a big review of them all a year or two ago. Different bootloaders tend to be associated with different sets of platforms, and some do everythings (and are fat), some do little (and are small). Blob and bootldr are the two I've fiddled with - uboot is increasingly popular. I'm sure they are all less aggravation than PC BIOSes as they have a great deal less ancient cruft in them :-) Certainly getting it to work on new hardware in a week or two is often perfectly reasonable. See: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/armlinux/docs/ARMbooting/t1.html for a discussion of booting Linux on ARM, and 9 bootloaders. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/
