fundamentals of U-Boot

[garimella]

I am a newbie and want to understand about u-boot. What is the difference between conventional method of developing a custom bootloader vs developing through u-boot. What does u-boot offer advantages for the firmware developer. What would be the good place to jump start

 

[boddusaipavan]

Normal boot loaders will just initialize your Ram, serial peripherals and some other hardware upon statup,And then after that by using JTAG you can dump your bin files on to RAM or OCM to run your code.

But by loading Uboot , it will initialize your flash devices( non volatile memory) so that you can copy your bin files into it directly. after that when you turn off your embedded hardware set the boot mode by using jumpers to that particular flash device and you can directly get your code executed upon start up.

But remember to load Uboot you have to initialize your RAM before that , and i will be done by your Boot loader.