There's a bit of a trend to embed a tiny ROM in the processor itself that's got just enough intelligence to bootstrap an image off various peripherals. The Bro

There's a bit of a trend to embed a tiny ROM in the processor itself that's got just enough intelligence to bootstrap an image off various peripherals. The Broadcom parts work like this for the VC4; the boot ROM can talk to an SD card, parse a FAT filesystem, and load and run the second-stage loader (bootcode.bin). But Allwinner chips do this too, and they're even smart enough to try several different media types (including SATA, IIRC!). Ditto Tegra parts. I imagine that if you're a major customer you get to choose the contents of the boot ROM. From a hacker perspective, it's brilliant, because the devices are completely unbrickable. It doesn't matter how broken they get, you can't change the ROM, which means that you always have ability to get something working. But, of course, they all have entirely different APIs. The VC4 just dumps an image into memory, sets a couple of registers, and jumps to it, and I imagine the others all do the same thing.