What happens during the boot process after the Raspberry PI is turned on? I know that it differs from the standard Linux boot process ( no complex boot manager like Lilo/Grub ), I also know that the boot process has several steps, the device loads files like loader.bin, bootcode.bin, start.elf, kernel.img... But what is the exact order of these steps?
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There is a boot manager; it is incredibly limited and only loads the files in a predefined order and can only deal with one operating system. – Alex Chamberlain Jul 22 '12 at 14:18
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No boot manager like Lilo or Grub. I've rephrased the question. – asalamon74 Jul 22 '12 at 15:32
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There is a boot loader, called Blob: http://elinux.org/Blob – dash17291 Oct 25 '12 at 13:48
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as I want to runs something at start, that last step is most interesting to me; when the kernel is started, is it execuiting a sort of script for items which the sysop cares to run st this time? if so, what is it named? – Deliberatus Jul 01 '13 at 01:33
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1possible duplicate of How does Raspberry Pi boot? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Apr 09 '15 at 00:12
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1This is the older question. Why not mark the other one as duplicate? – asalamon74 Apr 09 '15 at 09:51
1 Answers
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As said here the boot process:
- GPU Core
- first stage bootloader, which is stored in ROM on the SoC
- bootcode.bin (loader.bin merged)
- start.elf
- config.txt
- cmdline.txt
- kernel.img
After this boot scripts will be called by the kernel: systemd or init

ArchHaskeller
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1Additional info: The kernel is then loaded and the rest of the boot process is handled by
init
orsystemd
. – Jivings Jul 22 '12 at 18:34 -
1As of 0ct 05, 2012,
loader.bin
is not used anymore. It was integrated intobootcode.bin
and removed. – Krzysztof Adamski Oct 08 '12 at 06:46 -
@KrzysztofAdamski Could please you provide the source so that I can edit it. – ArchHaskeller Oct 09 '12 at 04:28
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@Haskeller: You mean the source of infrormation? If so, here's github commit – Krzysztof Adamski Oct 09 '12 at 07:59