First Stage Bootloader (FS-Boot)

Introduction

FS-Boot is a simple bootloader developed by PetaLogix, intended to serve as the primary bootstrap mechanism when the MicroBlaze CPU first boots. It is recommended for most applications that require a ready-to-run boot solution.

In a typical system runtime scenario, FS-Boot's primary purpose is to bootstrap the main system bootloader (such as U-Boot) from flash memory.

In the board bringup phase, FS-Boot may also be used to download an initial bootloader image (e.g. U-Boot), for first-time boot.

FS-Boot has the following features:

• Small code footprint to minimize on-chip BRAM resource usage
• Serial download for main bootloader (U-Boot) SREC images
• Auto-boot capability to launch main bootloader from flash memory.
• Serial download for kernel SREC images (for testing a debug purposes)

Scope and Background

The reader should have knowledge of the following topics:

• Familiar with using Xilinx Platform Studio.
• Buiding hardware projects using Xilinx EDK tools.
• Working with PetaLinux

Assumptions

This section make the following assumptions:

• The user's custom hardware project already exist and is added to PetaLinux.