A lightweight bootloader based on MIPS architecture for mobile devices: research and implementation

A bootloader's main function is to initialize the hardware, pass an abstraction of the initialized hardware, a hardware description, to and execute the kernel. While most bootloaders concentrate on ARM or PowerPC architecture, in this paper we propose a lightweight bootloader based on MIPS architecture. The lightweight bootloader is mainly for mobile devices. First, we introduce the architecture of the bootloader and some special requirements for mobile devices are considered. Then, based on the architecture, we implement the bootloader in MIPS assembly language and C language. To validate our research, we test the bootloader in a real MIPS-based evaluation board. The results show that our bootloader works quite well. With MIPS technology's role becoming more and more important in mobile Internet, we hope that the bootloader developed in this paper will be utilized in the future.