Overview

In Figure 4-1 you will see a description of the boot process showing the system image and the binary files that it consists of and the flow of control between them.

Figure 4-1 Boot Process

The power-up program is required when the operating system boots from the ROM. Otherwise, power-up inititializations are performed by the initial loader (firmware or ChorusOS bootMonitor).

The bootconf binary gets control from the power-up initialization program (or from the initial loader) and launches the bootstrap program. The bootstrap program launches the debug agent, the reboot program and the microkernel, according to the boot-kernel interface (BKI) specification (see "The Boot-Kernel Interface" for details).

The right part of the figure shows the BootConf data structure that is initialized by the bootconf part of the boot program and used to pass information to other binary programs in the system image.

The only jump between programs in the boot process is between the boot program and the microkernel.