Boot Process

= A10 Boot overview = While the Allwinner series of SoC's are quite open, there is an unmodifiable ROM called BROM or Boot ROM that is in charge of booting the SoC. The BROM will try to load the SPL from U-Boot, which in turn loads the kernel.

It should be noted, that if using Allwinner bootloaders (especially true when booting from nand storage), the order is slightly different. BROM loads boot0 as its SPL and that chainloads boot1. These all reside in unaccessable (not easily anyway) nand flash, before the partition table. boot1 loads boot.axf from the first fat partition which in turn chainloads (in our case) u-boot and then the kernel. It is in theory possible to directly boot the kernel, or some other OS. Also boot.axf has the ability to display images on the framebuffer.