The role of the bootloader

The first time that electricity runs into a development board processor, a great number of hardware components need to be prepared before running a program. For each architecture, hardware manufacturer, and even processor, this initialization process is different. In most cases, it involves a set of configurations and actions are different for a variety of processors and ends up fetching the bootstrap code from a storage device available in the proximity of the processor. This storage device is usually a flash memory and the bootstrap code is the first stage of the bootloader, and the one that initializes the processor and relevant hardware peripherals.

The majority of the available processors when power is applied to them go to a default address location, and after finding the first bytes of binary data, start executing them. Based on this information, the hardware designers define the layout for the flash memory and the address ranges that could later be used...