Cogent will be exhibing at the Freescale Technology Forum. Visit us in the FTF Technology Lab and see our new upcoming MPC5121e and i.MX31 Lite Kits! Click here to register.

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

Micromonitor sources for all Cogent single board computers, including olderboards are available for free to existing customers. They are updated often, but no support is provided. Use at your own risk.

The sources to Micromonitor are offered by Mr. Sutter under Lucent's Open License . Micromonitor supports all of the Cogent Computer Development Boards. The sources build with GNU X-Tools on Windows and Linux host platforms.

Microcross provides an online repository for the Micromonitor documentation. They also have collaborated with Ed Sutter to produce the "Micromonitor Training Guide". For more information got to: http://www.microcross.com/html/training_guides.html.