Booting your System

There are many ways of booting an embedded system and it is largely dependant on the bootloader used and the types of boot configuration. PetaLinux provide a dual-phase boot process to achieve an optimal boot configuration.

This section will provide the user with guidelines on booting their target platform using the dual-phase boot process. Refer to the Why Two Bootloaders Section for more information on this boot configuration.

Loading First Stage Bootloader

The initial boot, requies for the hardware bitstreams to be downloaded onto target FPGA device.

This process will start the FS-Boot bootloader once the bitstream download is completed.

Refer to the Booting FS-Boot Section for detail information on how to start FS-Boot.

Download U-Boot SREC Image

Interrupt the FS-Boot prompt with a 's' character to select SREC image download option in FS-Boot.

Download the /tftpboot/u-boot.srec file to the target device. Refer to the FS-Boot SREC Image Download Section for detail information.

FS-Boot will automatically start U-Boot once the image download is completed.

Loading Linux Kernel

Once U-Boot is booted it is now possible to use U-Boot to load the Linux kernel image into memory and boot the Linux kernel.

Use either the serial or ethernet connection to download the /tftpboot/image.bin file into the start address of your SDRAM address range. Refer to the Downloading Files to U-Boot Section? for more information.

Booting the Linux Kernel

Once the kernel image is successfully downloaded. Use the following command to boot the Linux kernel.

U-Boot> go $(fileaddr)

The $(fileaddr) variable will be resolved to the location of the last loaded file in this case will be the address at which the kernl image was loaded.

The kernel boot messages will appear on the console.