Which is the inexpensive Boot loader for PowerPc/ARM/MIPS based cards?

Better than U-Boot? What do you not like about U-Boot?

I have done several embedded Router platforms, and I have used U-Boot for all of them. It has a wide set of features, supports many platforms and will normally fit in less than 128KB of memory.

I am not sure what else you could want.

Chuck

Chuck,

Actually we are doing small project based on TiniARM card, which is based on ARM Processor, 128KB Flash and 64K RAM (Philips 2610 based Microcontroller), basically we would like to load tini Bootloader and then OS onto it (uC-OS-ii), looking for very compact Boot Loader for this ARM Microcontroller. Please suggest us which one will be better.

Thanks for your time.

Why do you need a bootloader at all? What do you expect a bootloader to do on a board like that? It's not like you've got to load a file into RAM from a filesystem on a disk. Just build your program and burn it into Flash.

I have done linux projects on MIPS with no bootloader at all. Like Grant mentioned, there was a small amount of 'startup' code which simply initialized the system, decompressed the OS into memory and passed control to the OS.

While this did not allow for the same amount of control as U-Boot, it was very compact and effective.

In the OP's case (with 128K of ROM and 64K of RAM) I don't even see how there could be a "decompress the OS into memory" step. He's in all likelyhood just going to run directly from ROM.

I'm not sure what there would be to congrol if you're running directly from ROM unless it's a _really_ small program, you put multiple versions in ROM, and you actually _do_ load one into RAM to run it. With 64KB of RAM, I doubt he's going to be running from RAM.