November 2008
Intermediate to advanced
478 pages
10h 38m
English
Content preview from Professional Windows® Embedded CE 6.0Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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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 ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.