Professional Windows® Embedded CE 6.0

Chapter 7. Boot Loader Overview

In the previous chapter, I talked about the Board Support Package, the OS design, connecting to the target device, the debugging environment, and debugging tools. All of these development processes come into play after the boot loader.

In the Windows Embedded CE development environment, the boot loader is the first piece of code to develop for a new hardware platform and is needed to download the debug and release mode OS runtime images to the hardware platform. Unless you're developing brand-new hardware from the ground up, it's not likely that you need to develop new boot loader code from scratch.

In general, the hardware platform manufacturer is likely to have a platform that supports the Windows Embedded CE environment and provides the reference development hardware with a boot loader and a BSP to support that environment. Microsoft also provides a sample boot loader, with source code, as part of the Platform Builder installation, for developers to use as the starting point to create their own boot loaders.

What Is a Boot Loader?

For a hardware platform that requires an operating system (OS), the boot loader is the code responsible for launching that system. The boot loader is unique to each hardware platform. For many devices, immediately after power is applied to an embedded device, the boot loader is the first piece of code to be executed.

There are devices that ship without a boot loader. For these devices, the system reset process bootstraps the ...