Moving from bootloader to kernel
When the bootloader passes control to the kernel it has to pass some basic information to the kernel, which may include some of the following:
- On PowerPC and ARM architectures: a number unique to the type of the SoC
- Basic details of the hardware detected so far, including at least the size and location of the physical RAM, and the CPU clock speed
- The kernel command line
- Optionally, the location and size of a device tree binary
- Optionally, the location and size of an initial RAM disk
The kernel command line is a plain ASCII string which controls the behavior of Linux, setting, for example, the device that contains the root filesystem. I will look at the details of this in the next chapter. It is common to provide the ...
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