U Boot - lalilulelulz/Chromium-OS-Coreboot GitHub Wiki

U-Boot (Universal Boot) is a useful basis for firmware because it has wide architecture support and contains many drivers and subsystems. Chrome OS uses an upstream version of U-Boot and adds its own verified boot infrastructure, which is linked to U-Boot. Many of the drivers and features in U-Boot are used by verified boot. Some of the advantages of U-Boot are

It is a relatively simple boot loader that is easy to modify and adjust to various needs. It is popular on Power PC and widely available on ARM. It includes a comprehensive command-line interface and environment system that allows for persistent state across reboots.

Supports a device tree structure that accommodates hardware differences It supports most common files systems, USB, SPI, I2C, displays, SD/MMC, SCSI, and NAND flash. It has a large upstream community and active mailing list.

U-Boot was started in 2002 by Wolfgang Denk, who based his work on previous Power PC development (PPCBoot) by Magnus Damm. Wolfgang Denk is the primary maintainer of U-Boot source code (see www.denx.de). U-Boot is available in the Git tree. Patchwork is used to manage patches to the tree. All development is done in patches sent to the u-boot mailing list.