CHAPTER 16

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Boot

When the power is first applied to the Raspberry Pi, or it has been reset (see the “Reset” section of Chapter 5), a boot sequence is initiated. As you will see in this chapter, it is the GPU that actually brings up the ARM CPU.

The way that the Raspberry Pi is designed, it must be booted from firmware found on the SD card. It cannot boot from any other source. RISC code for the GPU is provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in the file bootcode.bin.

After the second-stage boot loader has been executed, it is possible that other operating systems or ARM boot loaders such as U-Boot can be initiated.

Booting ARM Linux

Generally speaking, ...

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