Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Boot loader

Here are boot loader related questions that are of great interest and that can be used for our discussions.... Check it out !

1. What are the various boot loaders that you have worked on ?
2. Where is the boot loader present in an embedded system design ?
3. In general, what does the boot loader do ?
4. What is the role of boot loader in embedded systems ?
5. How will you handle a scenario in which the boot software is erased/corrupted ?
6. How will you handle boot software erasure/corruption scenario if Boot ROM is not available ?
7. What do you mean by bootstrap loader and what does it do ?
8. Is booting different from bootstrapping ?
9. When the computer is powered ON, it does not have OS it in neither ROM nor RAM - True/False ?
10. What is a second-stage boot loader ?
11. Do LILO/GRUB/Syslinux belong to either first stage boot loader(small program) or second-stage boot loaders ?
12. What is network booting ?
13. What is Chain loading or Multi-stage boot loader ?
14. Can you brief up the boot sequence of a normal desktop computer ?
15. Tell about OMAP CPU booting ?
16. What are the most common boot modes of DSP processor ?
17. Give few examples for systems that use Host Port(HPI Boot) for DSP booting ?
18. How will you put U-Boot into the target board ?
19. TFTP is a stripped down version of FTP that does not require authentication - True/False ?
20. Why do you need 2 stage boot process in OMAP processor ?
21. Can you give a highlevel view of Linux Boot process ?
22. What is the role of MBR and its relation with BIOS ?
23. Where is the MBR located ?
24. What is the structure of MBR ?
25. The secondary, or second-stage, boot loader could be more aptly called the kernel loader - True / False
26. What is the relation between GRUB and filesystem while booting ? or Main Difference between LILO and GRUB ?
27. What is the difference between zImage and bzImage ?
28. What is the role of initrd/Initial RAM disk ?
29. What is the role of initrd/Initial RAM disk in Embedded systems ?
30. Can you tell about the major function-level flow for Linux i386 booting ?
31. Does GRUB involve a 3-stage boot loading ? If yes, what are they . Brief it ?

Hope this list will help in equipping yourself for few of major interview questions related with boot loaders :-)

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