A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.
03 October 2012
Read the “RPIforum”:http://elinux.org/RPi_Software outline carefully. No boot rom, no boot loader. Instead:
The boards do not include NAND or NOR storage - everything is on the SD card, which has a FAT32 partition with GPU firmware and a kernel image, and an EXT2 partition with the rootfs. We’re not currently using a bootloader - we actually boot via the GPU, which contains a proprietary RISC core (wacky architecture). The GPU mounts the SD card, loads GPU firmware and brings up display/video/3d, loads a kernel image, resets the SD card host and starts the ARM.
I was hopelessly confused as to why I needed a kernel image and a system disk image until I read this. It is no goofier than the PC BIOS but is just different.