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Firmware Management for MCUs: The Quark Bootloader Approach - Daniele Alessandrelli, Intel

898 views · Published 28 February 2017 · 38:48 · Indexed 24 October 2026

Channel: The Linux Foundation · 2017 · Science & Technology

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Firmware Management for MCUs: The Quark Bootloader Approach - Daniele Alessandrelli, Intel

The Intel Quark Microcontroller Bootloader (qm-bootloader) is the reference bootloader for Intel Quark MCUs. Qm-bootloader is released under a BSD license and available on GitHub. 

One of the main features of qm-bootloader is its DFU-based Firmware Management functionality over USB and UART. The DFU protocol and its most popular host-side implementation, dfu-util, have been adapted to UART, in order to provide users with a uniform firmware-upgrade experience. Additionally, on top of DFU, a simple Firmware Management protocol has been implemented, extending DFU functionality beyond mere firmware upgrades. 

The talk will cover qm-bootloader design and implementation, focusing on its Firmware Management functionality and discussing possible security extensions. 

The concepts presented are not limited to Intel architectures, but can be leveraged on different platforms.

About Daniele Alessandrelli
Daniele Alessandrelli is a software engineer at Intel. In the last year, he has been working on the Quark Microcontrollers Software Interface and the Quark Bootloader of which he is the main maintainer. Daniele has presented before at some academic conferences such as the European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN) 2012 and the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS) 2013.

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