i.MX6 Boot

This is another post that amounts to a Thank you for sharing. In this case, the thanks go to Alexandre Belloni for sharing some work on Boot time optimization he did at Adeneo Embedded. We became aware of Alexandre’s work through this thread on the U-Boot mailing list back in February. Note that this work was not done on one of our boards and doesn’t use U-Boot, but it’s cool, and it stands as proof of what the right team can achieve and a target for us all. In order to achieve this speed, Alexandre needed to do much more than optimize the boot loader though. Tailoring the early Linux startup process was every bit as important and the result is quite impressive. More details can be found: on Alexandre’s YouTube channel, in a paper he published via elinux.org, and Alexandre is currently working at Free Electrons in France and can be reached there. Well done, Alexandre, and thanks for sharing. Whoosh is an ARM Linux bootloader forked from arm-kernel-shim aimed to be really small and fast. The ultimate goal of the projet is to be a repository of various bootloader designed to be fast. It is not aiming at being generic or flexible. For now, whoosh supports Freescale i.mx53 and i.mx6x platforms. To build: ========= $ make <board>_config $ make A script is provided to help building the final bootloader + kernel image and flash it on an SDcard. Run it from the root directory of whoosh : $ make <board>_config $ ./script/FSL.sh -k <path to kernel Image or zImage> -m <path to mkimage> [<mmcdevice>]