# Building u-boot



## balanga (Aug 13, 2018)

The source for u-boot is available here, not that I understand exactly what you can do with it... My understanding is that it is something like a BIOS for embedded devices and is used for loading an operating system. Does that mean that u-boot does not contain anything Linux specific and could be built on FreeBSD?

My main reason for looking at the source is that it contains the source for kwboot.c (in the tools directory), a program that I've been struggling to get working on FreeBSD for a while.  It isn't apparent to me how you are supposed to build it. There is a pretty big Makefile in the parent directory but my eyes just glaze over when trying to read it. Should I just run `make tools` or should that be `gmake tools`?


----------



## Lamia (Aug 13, 2018)

What a brilliant question!
Could the code be tuned {updated} for tier 2 embedded systems, in particular Pandaboard?
It takes a very long time, some tweaks and repeated efforts to get FBSD 11.x to run with the current UBoot for cortex A8.


----------



## balanga (Aug 13, 2018)

There is a board/ subdirectory which lists 250 boards but I don't see any mention of Pandaboard or Cortex, but not really sure what I'm looking for.


----------



## Lamia (Aug 13, 2018)

That was not a suggestion on how to do what you want to do.
Hopefully, the core dev team will update the uboot for cortex A8 and A9 even though the manufacturing of Pandaboard is now pretty much discontinued.


----------

