Micromonitor Boot ROM

MicroMonitor is an embedded system boot platform by Mr Ed Sutter of Lucent Technologies. It is centered around an extensible embedded flash file system called TFS. With TFS in the monitor, things like XMODEM and TFTP (also in the monitor) can now refer to files instead of address space. The whole boot-up strategy is driven by the content of one or more files that can be scripts or executable images. The file system is accessible at the command line and through an API accessible by the application. The API provides a flexible means of reading and writing files in flash, plus the TFS implementation provides power-safe runtime defragmentation as the flash fills up. A network-accessible, MicroMonitor-based embedded system provides a firmware development project with immediate network boot (DHCP/BOOTP), file based maintainability, in-field upgrade and in-system diagnostics.

MicroMonitor Sources and Documentation

Source code and documentation for MicroMonitor (aka uMon) is available at http://www.umonfw.com. It is available free-of-charge under the OSI-approved Lucent Public License.

The MicroMonitor platform runs on all of the Cogent Computer Development Boards. The sources build with GNU cross-compilation tools on Windows (Cygwin) and Linux host platforms. All ports are currently maintained using the GNU X-Tools Package from Microcross.