Chapter 4. Booting Linux

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IN THIS CHAPTER

• The Target PBRs

• The Linux Boot Process

• The Linux root Filesystem

• Creating the root Filesystem

• Installing the TFTP Server

• Installing minicom

• Booting the Embedded Planet RPX-CLLF

• Booting the Brightstar Engineering MediaEngine

• Booting the Tri-M MZ104 and the COTS PC with a Flash IDE Drive

• Boot Comparison

• Additional Reading

Project Trailblazer was off and running. The Silverjack Engineering Department ordered the development target platforms and other hardware: the Embedded Planet RPX-CLLF, the Brightstar Engineering MediaEngine, the Tri-M MZ104 x86 single-board computer, and the solid-state hard disk hardware to boot a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) PC. The staff then had a few days to learn about the Linux boot process and the root filesystem for the four target platforms. Fortunately, Linux's code commonality simplifies development and deployment, regardless of platform. This chapter chronicles the team's booting journey. The team wanted to ultimately run its version of helloworld on all the target platforms.

The engineers developed a small set of platform boot requirements (PBRs) for all the incoming target boards. These requirements are simple and are shown in the following section. When the boards are successfully booted, they will form the baseline development system, shown in Figure 4.1, on which to build Project Trailblazer.

Figure 4.1. The Project Trailblazer development layout.

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