Testing boot loaders
I wonder whether I could ask a general question, with a particular focus
on Debian ARM devices.
I've got in front of me a file containing the image of an SD-Card that
I've exfiltrated from a Kobo ereader onto which somebody wants me to put
Debian. It appears to have a common or garden partition table at the
start, live and recovery filesystems, and then a large storage area:
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
kobo.bin1 49152 573440 524289 256M 83 Linux
kobo.bin2 573441 1097729 524289 256M 83 Linux
kobo.bin3 1097730 7744511 6646782 3.2G b W95 FAT32
I believe that there's a configured copy of U-Boot and the kernel in the
unpartitioned area at the start of the device, there isn't any jump code
in the partition table.
The device is based on the "Freescale MX50 Reference Design Platform",
and kernel sources etc. are available on Github, I think I can see that
the boot loader's entry is at 0xF8006458.
Is it possible to use Qemu or some comparable emulator to check the boot
sequence in situ, i.e. without breaking the U-Boot and kernel images out
into separate files?
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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