A boot loader for Embedded boards based on PowerPC, ARM, MIPS and other processors, which can be installed in a boot ROM and used to initialize and test the hardware or to download and run application code.
The development of U-Boot is closely related to Linux: some parts of the source code originate in the Linux source tree, we have some header files in common, and special provision has been made to support booting of Linux images.
Some attention has been paid to make this software easily configurable and extendable. For instance, all monitor commands are implemented with the same call interface, so that it's very easy to add new commands. Also, instead of permanently adding rarely used code (for instance hardware test utilities) to the monitor, you can load and run it dynamically.
