U-Boot uses a special image format when loading the Linux kernel or
ramdisk or other images. This image contains (among other things)
information about the time of creation, operating system, compression
type, image type, image name and CRC32 checksums.
The tool
mkimage is used to create such images or
to display the information they contain.
When using the
ELDK, the
mkimage command is
already included with the other
ELDK tools.
If you don't use the
ELDK then you should install
mkimage in some directory that is in your command
search
PATH, for instance:
$ cp tools/mkimage /usr/local/bin/
mkimage is readily available in several distributions; for example,
in
Ubuntu it is part of the
u-boot-tools package,
so it can be installed with:
$ sudo apt-get install u-boot-tools
In
Fedora the package name is
uboot-tools,
and the command to install it is:
$ sudo dnf install uboot-tools
Finally, if you're building with
OpenEmbedded or
Yocto Project, you would want to add the
u-boot-fw-utils recipe to your image.
