Booting Process of Smart phones

Anjali Gavendra and Manisha Sharma M.Tech, Mobile and Pervasive Computing (MPC) IGDTUW, Kashmere Gate, Delhi
Abstract--With change in time, luxury becomes requirement and so is the case with mobiles.Today having a smart phone is no longer a luxury but a necessity.There has been development in the all the sphere of mobile be it hardware(camera, processor, memory)or software(operating system, apps) but the general booting process of all smart phones remains same. This paper deals with the booting process of Smart phones which describes how a Smart phones works when it is turned on. Today with different variety of mobile platforms coming up every day such as Android, Symbian, Blackberry etc. are associated with different booting procedures. In this paper we will cover up the boot process in general term for Smart phones. We have also discussed the booting process of some widely used operating systems in Smart phones named as Windows, Android, Symbian, ioS OS. Index Terms -- Booting, Operating System , Android, WP Booting Process In the Booting process, System will check all the hardwares and Softwares those are installed or attached with the System and this will also load all the Files those are needed for running a system from ROM [3] Booting typically takes few seconds and typically involves hardwired test, locating and initializing peripheral devices, and then finding, loading and starting an operating system[1] Time required by different smartphones for booting is as follows: Model Name SamsungDUOS S5222 Karbonn A1+ Samsung GALAXY Y GT-S5360 Booting Time 54 Seconds 58 Seconds 49 Seconds

I. INTRODUCTION
Booting Definition:Booting ,also known as bootstrap, is the initial set of operations that a system performs when the Smart phoness are switched on or are reenergized after being turned off or when it is reset or when it starts up while running it, and ends when the mobile is ready to perform its normal operations then the control has been transferred to the user.[1] Booting is also defined as the starting-up of a computer, which involves loading the operating system and other basic softwares[2]

Every operating system has a different booting procedure of its own.The examples of various operating systems used in Smart phoness are Nokia's Symbian OS, Apple's IOS, RIM's BlackBerry OS, Microsoft's Windows Phone OS, Linux, Palm WebOS, Google's Android, Samsung's Bada (operating system) and Nokia's Maemo.

II. BOOTING OF A SMART PHONES

Booting is used to load the first piece of software that starts a smart phone.Because the

operating system is essential for running all other programs, it is usually the first piece of software loaded during the boot process. Different operating systems is having different steps for booting in Smart phoness, but in general terms steps which are common in all booting processes of mobiles are illustrated as follows:

the job of boot loader, whose job is to locate and load the kernel. Kernel Kernel manages input/outut requests from software and translates them into data processing instructions for the central processing unit and other electronic components of a Smart phones. The kernel is the first part of the operating system to load into memory by boot loader during booting (i.e., system start up),kernel remains in memory for the entire duration of the mobile session because its services are required continuously[6][7]. Thus it is important for it to be as small as possible while still providing all the essential services needed by the other parts of the operating system and by the various application programs, typically including

Figure 1: Steps for booting of a Smart phones[4]

Bootstrap As soon as the power button is pressed, it leads to a reset of CPU(registers values are set to predefined value). The code which executes the task at the initial stages of booting is hardwired and is stored at a fixed location. Hardwired Refers to elements of a program or device that cannot be changed. As the hardware connected to mobile is always fixed, so the preliminary task is very basic which includes checking of all chip components working properly[5]. Then next is

Figure 2 : Kernel[7]

memory management, process management, file management and I/O (input/output) management (i.e., accessing the peripheral devices). These services are requested by other parts of the operating system or by application programs. Kernel stage can also be broken in few stages. But the preliminary stage is BSP-Board Support Packages, which is the code specific to hardware/chip. BSP is responsible for the

assigning of the various functionality operations to the controllers and pins of the chip. After this, operations such as initialization of interrupt controllers, setting up of memory protections, caches and scheduling, memory management occur. File system Generally speaking file system is way of organizing data. This is very basic definition, but the tasks performed by file system are itself very vast. This stage is loaded by the boot loader and is called in the middle of the Kernel stage. All the data present in the Smart phones is organized, stored and updated because of file system. System startup As the kernel and file system are up, then the system start up process can began. From this stage all the processes that occur are related directly with the user space applications. From the libraries to the framework, all the work takes place in this layer. Web manager, Sound manager, Graphics manager etc. all are brought to life in this phase. At the end of this phase applications are launched. Graphic user interface(GUI) This is the final and apparent stage, which is seen by everyone. This leads to the display of the user defined settings and the applications launching. GUI is graphic user interface that is a way of communicating with the mobile by its user.

developed by Android, Inc., which Google backed financially.it is Google's open and free software stack that includes an operating system, middleware and also key applications for use on Smart phones[8]. The booting process of a Android Smart phones is as follows:

Figure 3.1 Android Booting process[20] Step1: Power on and boot rom code execution At power on the CPU will be in a state where no initializations have been done. Internal clocks are not set up and the only memory available is the internal RAM. When power supplies are stable the execution will start with the Boot ROM code. This is a small piece of code that is hardwired in the CPU ASIC( application-specific integrated circuit) for this particular use.

III. BOOTING PROCESS OF ANDROID

Android is a Linux-based operating system designed primarily for touchscreen Smart phoness such as smartphones and tablet computers. Initially

Figure 3: Loading Boot Rom to physical memory[9]

The Boot ROM code will detect the boot media using a system register that maps to some physical balls on the asic. This is to determine where to find the first stage of the boot loader. Once the boot media sequence is established the boot ROM will try to load the first stage boot loader to internal RAM as shown in figure 3. Once the boot loader is in place the boot ROM code will perform a jump and execution continues in the boot loader.

Figure 4: loading boot loader to external RAM

Step 2: The boot loader The boot loader is a special program separate from the Linux kernel that is used to set up initial memories and load the kernel to RAM as shown in figure 4.

The first boot loader stage will detect and set up external RAM. Once external RAM is available and the system is ready the to run something more significant the first stage will load the main boot loader and place it in external RAM.

The second stage of the boot loader is the first major program that will run. This may contain code to set up file systems, additional memory, network support and other things. On a Smart phones it may also be responsible for loading code for the modem CPU and setting up low level memory protections and security options. Once the boot loader is done with any special tasks it will look for a Linux kernel to boot. It will load this from the boot media (or some other source depending on system configuration) and place it in the RAM. It will also place some boot parameters in memory for the kernel to read when it starts up. Once the boot loader is done it will perform a jump to the Linux kernel, usually some decompression routine, and the kernel assumes system responsibility.

Step3: The Android kernel The Android kernel starts up in a similar way on Android as on other systems. It will set up

everything that is needed for the system to run. Initialize interrupt controllers, set up memory protections, caches and scheduling as shown in figure 5.

The init process will parse the init script and launch the system service processes.

Figure 6: init process Figure 5:loading kernel

Step5: Zygote and dalvik Android does not run directly on top of the kernel since it has been coded in Java and therefore needs to be run on top of a Virtual Machine - Java being marketed as write once, run anywhere.The Zygote is launched by the init process and will basically just start executing and and initialize the Dalvik Virtual Machine(VM). In a Java, separate Virtual Machine instance will popup in memory for separate per app, In case of Android app should launch as quick as possible, If Android os launch different instance of Dalvik VM for every app then it consume lots of memory and time. Also the memory foot print of the VM is required to be minimal.so, to overcome this problem Android introduced a concept called Zygote as shown in figure 7.

Once the memory management units and caches have been initialized the system will be able to use virtual memory and launch user space processes. The kernel will look in the root file system for the init process and launch it as the initial user space process.

Step4: The init process The init process is the "grandmother" of all system processes. Every other process in the system will be launched from this process or one of its descendants as shown in figure 6.

The init process in Android will look for a file called init.rc. This is a script that describes the system services, file system and other parameters that need to be set up.

Figure 7: Zygote and dalvik

figure 8: System Server process Zygote enable shared code across Dalvik VM, lower memory footprint and minimal startup time. Zygote is a VM process that starts at system boot time. The Zygote process initializes one Dalvik VM, which preloads and preinitializes code library classes.Normally there core classes are read-only and part of Android SDK or Core frameworks. Once the Zygote has initialized, it will sit and wait for socket requests coming from the runtime process indicating that it should fork newVM instances based on the ZygoteVMinstanceAs Zygotes has to be run before Android core processes can be executed, it is launched by the kernel, as part of the init sequence, already in the user space.[10] Step6: The system server The system server is the first java component to run in the system. It will start all the Android services such as telephony manager and bluetooth. Start up of each service is currently written directly into the run method of the system server as shown in figure 8. Step7: Boot completed Once the System Server is up and running and the system boot has completed there is a standard broadcast action called ACTION_BOOT_COMPLETED

IV. BOOTING PROCESS OF WINDOWS PHONE 7

Boot Process Overview

Fast OS startup performance is critical for a good user experience. The time required to boot the operating system on a given Smart phones to the point where the user can start working is one of the most important benchmarks for Windows client performance. The Windows boot process consists of several phases which are explained in more detail by the picture and supporting text below BIOS Initialization During the BIOS Initialization phase, the platform firmware identifies and initializes hardware devices, and then runs a power-on

self-test (POST). The POST process ends when the BIOS detects a valid system disk, reads the master boot record (MBR), and starts

OS Initialization During the OS Initialization phase, most of the operating system work occurs. This phase involves kernel initialization, Plug and Play activity, service start, logon, and Explorer (desktop) initialization. The OS Initialization can be divided into four subphases. Each subphase has unique characteristics and performance vulnerabilities. After we have taken a boot trace the different subphases are shown as follows : Sub phase 1PreSMSS: Kernel Initialization The PreSMSSsubphase begins when the kernel is invoked. During this subphase, the kernel initializes data structures and components. It also starts the PnP manager, which initializes the BOOT_START drivers that were loaded during the OSLoader phase. Sub phase 2 - SMSSInit : Session Initialization The SMSSInitsubphase begins when the kernel passes control to the session manager process (Smss.exe). During this subphase, the system initializes the registry, loads and starts the devices and drivers that are not marked BOOT_START, and starts the subsystem processes. SMSSInit ends when control is passed to Winlogon.exe. Sub phase 3 - WinLogonInit: Winlogon Initialization The WinLogonInitsubphase begins when SMSSInit completes and starts Winlogon.exe. During WinLogonInit, the user logon screen appears, the service control manager starts services, and Group Policy scripts run. WinLogonInit ends when the Explorer process starts.

figure 9: booting process of windows phone 7

Bootmgr.exe. Bootmgr.exe finds and starts Winload.exe on the Windows boot partition, which begins the OSLoaderphase.The BIOS version, the BIOS configuration and the firmware of the computer hardware components can have an impact on the overall boot performance .We should check the BIOS configuration (device boot order, PXE bootenabled, Quick/Fast boot (POST check) enabled, AHCI settings). OS Loader During the OSLoader phase, the Windows loader binary (Winload.exe) loads essential system drivers that are required to read minimal data from the disk and initializes the system to the point where the Windows kernel can begin execution. When the kernel starts to run, the OSloader loads the system registry hive and additional drivers that are marked as BOOT_START into memory. This phase is mainly impacted by boot start drivers. While a delay caused by a dual boot menu would be easy to fix, make sure that all boot start drivers are signed and up-to-date.

Sub phase 4 ExplorerInit: Explorer Initialization The ExplorerInitsubphase begins when Explorer.exe starts. During ExplorerInit, the system creates the desktop window manager (DWM) process, which initializes the desktop and displays it for the first time.

Switching on the phone triggers the CPU and MMU to reset. This disables the MMU and causes the CPU to jump to a well-known location to execute the reset code. On ARM CPUs, this is address 0x00000000, which is usually referred to as the reset vector. Obviously there must be some code at physical address zero for this to work and hence some hardware - usually this will be some masked ROM or XIP Flash.Smartphoness typically use some form of Flash memory to store the OS image and built-in software.[11]Although this is significantly more expensive (and slower) than masked ROM, there are two substantial advantages: 1) Smart phonessare complex products and often require an update during their lifetime. Flash memory enables the OS to be overwritten or upgraded (reflashed) . 2) Masked ROM takes time to manufacture. This introduces a delay of several weeks between the software being ready and the production of the phone.

Figure 10: windows booting

V. BOOTING IN SYMBIAN OPERATING SYSTEM

Following is the description about how the Symbian takes the hardware from an uninitialized, powered-off state to one in which the system is fully ready for action. To successfully initialize the hardware and OS, it is important to know what state the hardware will be in immediately after it has been switched on or reset. For the most part, the OS has to assume that hardware is in an unknown state because the boot process may arise from several causes.[11]

Some types of non-volatile memory, such as NOR Flash, can be treated by the memory controller as directly accessed, read-only memory. This allows program code to execute directly from Flash memory, which makes initial system startup much simpler. It is interesting to compare this to desktop systems where the operating system resides on hard disk and must be loaded into RAM before it is possible to start executing any of the code. There are some Flash technologies, such as NAND Flash, that cannot support execute- inplace and thus require a boot process that more closely resembles that of a desktop OS. Brief discussion on the Symbian booting is as follows :

A. Switching the phone on triggers a hardware reset. The first software that is executed after this is known as the bootstrap. On entry to the bootstrap, the execution environment is very primitive, and the bootstrap is tasked with providing a basic execution environment for the kernel process B. On entry to the kernel, the CPU is now running at full speed and an execution stack allows typical C++ code to be run. However, there is still only a primitive memory environment and only one execution path. Static data is now initialized and interrupts are masked. Once kernel and base support package (BSP) initialization is complete, there is full management of CPU, memory, power and peripherals and the second OS process is started . C. At this stage in the boot there is a fully functional micro-kernel that supports multiple multi-threaded, protected usermode processes. However, the OS has not yet provided the means to instantiate new processes, to extract file-based data from the Flash or to persist data in read/write Flash memory. The process of establishing all of these services falls to EFILE.EXE and its supporting process, ESTART.EXE D. All of the kernel, user library and file server services are now fully initialized ready for the rest of the OS to begin its boot process - a job that is given to the system starter process. The system starter manages the initialization of the rest of the OS system services in an ordered manner, and can also provide monitoring and restart for those which terminate unexpectedly. The precise order in which the persistence, communications, multimedia, security and other services are started is controlled by a script and is phonespecific

E. Once enough of the system services are running, the primary GUI service, the window server, can be started. This now allows initialization of the other UI services and the applications that make up the aspect of the OS that is most evident to the user. This is a standard sequence for booting the phone. This is a standard sequence for booting the phone. According to this process, the OS services for displaying images or animations, or playing audio become available quite late in the boot. This does not reconcile with the typical experience of using a Symbian OS phone - in practice phones often use lower level graphics services to display images during boot without demanding that the full screen-sharing capabilities of the window server are available.

VI. iOS BOOTING PROCESS

iOS uses a secure boot chain. That is each stage of the boot process verifies the digital signature of the next before executing it. When the iPhone device is powered on, the BOOT ROM, which is hard-wired during chip fabrication, is loaded into VROM (Virtual ROM) and executed. Inside the BOOT ROM is the Apples Root Certificate Authority (CA) public key. It uses the public key to verify the digital signature of the LLB (low level bootloader) before executing it. The LLB is similar to the Stage1 bootloader on Android. The LLB loads iBoot, which is similar to the Android Stage2 bootloader, and then runs the iOS kernel and then the System Software. This completes the boot process for iOS. In iOS, each step of the boot-up process contains components that are cryptographically signed by Apple to ensure integrity, and proceeds only after verifying the chain of trust. This includes the bootloaders,

kernel, kernel extensions, and baseband firmware. iPhone boot process consists of multiple boot stages which are only loaded if the current stage is able to successfully verify the integrity and authenticity of the next stage to be loaded . When an iOS device is turned on, its application processor immediately executes code from read-only memory known as the Boot ROM. This immutable code is laid down during chip fabrication, and is implicitly trusted[13].The Boot ROM code contains the Apple Root CA public key, which is used to verify that the Low-Level Bootloader (LLB) is signed by Apple before allowing it to load. This is the first step in the chain of trust where each step ensures that the next is signed by Apple. When the LLB finishes its tasks, it verifies and runs the next-stage bootloader, iBoot, which in turn verifies and runs the iOS kernel and NAND Flash. This secure boot chain ensures that the lowest levels of software are not tampered with, and allows iOS to run only on validated Apple devices. Due to built-in chain of trust mechanism, it is really difficult for an investigator to gain lower level access during normal booting sequence. That requires iPhones special purpose boot mode, known as Device FirmwareUpgrade( DFU ) mode. This mode is designed to perform firmware upgrade for iPhone. This mode has an alternate boot sequence. This mode loads BootROM. BootROM loads second stage boot loaders iBSS and IBEC. iBEC checks the integrity of Kernel. Kernel checks the RamDisk and loads the contents of RamDisk into memory.

figure 11: normal mode boot sequence An investigator can design a custom toolkit and load it on custom RamDisk. This custom toolkit consists of tools required for forensic acquisition and basic UNIX tools like OpenSSH, netcat, md5sum etc. This custom RamDisk can be loaded into iPhones memory to perform forensic activities.

figure 12:Dfu mode boot sequence The different parts of the process are: DFU: Device Firmware Update.it is state when you can put your iPhone into where it can interface with iTunes but donotload the iphoneos or bootloader. iBSS: Independent basic service wifi ad hoc mode

techniques to a smartphones, and thereby overcome two major obstacles: long loading times for snapshot image and maintenance costs related to hardware change.[19]

REFERENCES [1] Boot definition

[online]

Available:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting
[2]Boot definition [online] Available:

VII. CONCLUSION
The Smart phoness have become an indispensible part of our lives. Now-a-days, there is neck to neck competition in the manufacturing of Smart phoness in the market. Every vendor yearns to provide a better operating system and thus features than its competitors. Although Booting of all OS is almost same. All OS includes mainly boot loaders, kernel, file server, system start up, GUI steps in their booting process like Symbian. But different OS has some additional or different steps too such as Android has Zygote and dalvik as an additional step. While ioS uses a secure boot chain and windows phone booting process is some likely similar to windows.

www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/boot.html [3] Booting Process,IBM, [online] Available: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/ind ex.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.aix.baseadmn%2F doc%2Fbaseadmndita%2Fbootproc.htm [4] Mobile Boot Straping, EngineersGarage... inspiring creation, [online] Available: http://www.engineersgarage.com/mygarage/ho w-mobile-phone-boots [5] Hardwired definition, Webopedia, [online]
Available:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/H/hardwir ed.html [6] Kernel definition, LINFO, [online]

Available:

http://www.linfo.org/kernel.html [7] Kernel definition, wikipedia, [online]

Available:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(computin g) [8] About Android,Wikipedia, [online]

Available:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operati ng_system)
[9] Android blog, The Android boot process from power on,Xdin, An Alten Company. [10] Android Boot Seqence, javigon, my cellar door [Online] Available:

VIII.FUTURE WORK
We will evaluate and try to find out the merits and demerits of different smartphones booting processes.Generally it is difcult to obtain quick boot time (under 5 seconds) using the fast boot techniques, and many parts of the software platform require additional optimization. An intuitive way to obtain instant boot times is to boot directly from hibernation. We apply hibernation-based

http://javigon.com/2012/08/24/from-poweronto-android-the-boot-sequence/
[11] Symbian OS Internals Book , Nokia Developer, http://developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/File: SymbianOSInternalsBook_16.1.png#

[12] Apple"-iOS security" October 2012 [Online] Available: http://images.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iOS _Security_Oct12.pdf [13] Wikipedia-The free Encylopedia. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting [14]Mobile handset with symbianos and update agent, Iyadqumel, Hunt1ngton Beach, CA(US), Patent No.: US 8,046,753 B1 [15]Smart phone system and booting publication classification Method thereof ,Zheng-weiZheng, Huizhou Zhhingchen,Huizhou (CN) [16] Wikipedia-The free Encylopedia. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

[17] The Google website. [Online]. Available: https://www.google.com. [18] The IEEE website. [Online]. Available: http://www.ieee.org [19]Future Work Initiative proposed [Online]. Available: https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2010/ols2010pages-9-18.pdf [20] General Android Boot Process: http://www.divaportal.org/smash/get/diva2:235591/ATTACHMEN T01