Patent — available for licensing
First Stage Bootloader
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
Software often has two main parts. One part is the main operating system (OS) image, which contains an OS kernel and run-time environment . The other part is the ram filesystem image, which contains application libraries. Both parts must be read from flash memory into the correct locations in DDR memory for the software to be fully operational. The system will store several copies of each file in flash memory, reducing the probability that radiation events will render a given file to be unreadable from flash memory. Previous bootloaders could read the main OS image from flash memory, read redundant copies of images, and synchronize flash memory usage between two processors sharing the same flash memory bank. However, previous bootloaders supported reading only one image from flash memory. They also do not support restarting watchdog timers, meaning the watchdog timer must be off during the boot process. The First Stage Bootloader improves on previous bootloader versions.