Eli5 How do companies add operating system into hardware devices?
In: Technology
There are a few different techniques. In order to write to the flash storage they use they need access to some special ports. One common technique is to have those ports available on the circuit board, either as pin connector or even sometimes as bare pads. A common industry standard is the JTAG which you can find on a lot of different circuit boards and gives you access to read and write to the internal storage without booting up the system. Some devices can also be programmed from any external ports, for example USB or serial ports. The system they base their product on does have a generic bootloader built into its hardware which does allow special codes to be sent through the external port to enable someone to write to the internal storage instead of booting the device. This feature can then be turned off if the external port can not be protected properly or it can be left on to allow for upgrades to the software.
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