These are the release notes for GenericBooter. Please read them carefully as they explain what this project is all about and how to compile/use it and also what to do if something goes horribly awry.

GenericBooter is a sample boot loader for Darwin/ARM systems. It is intended to be bootstrapped from another boot loader (namely Das U-boot). It will load the Mach kernel into memory, flatten the device tree and finally pass control to it.

Currently, GenericBooter has ports for:

• Texas Instruments OMAP3-series.
• Texas Instruments AM335x-series.
• ARM RealView boards.

Adding a board port is simple.

You will need standard development libraries and software, such as ncurses, gcc, flex, and so on. If you can compile the Linux kernel, you can compile this.

To compile using the arm-none-eabi- toolchain use:

$ make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-eabi-

You will need to run make menuconfig before doing that however.

Since this boot loader wraps images into the resulting binary, you will need 3 images in the images folder. They include:

• mach_kernel, wrapped as an uncompressed Mach-O file inside an Image3 with magic krnl. (Mach.img3)
• A ramdisk, wrapped as an uncompressed raw HFS(+) volume inside an Image3 with magic rdsk. (Ramdisk.img3)

If you are using an iOS compatible device tree, make sure you put a devicetree as DeviceTree.img3 inside the folder with the specified device tree. The same must be performed for an XML device tree.