As soon as you are on Linux you are generally confident with the embedded system, whatever it is. But often the boot process may hide some misteries, and understanding the details may help to recover a bricked board or to upgrade or replace a bootloader. The explained path would start from comparing some different SoC's, passing from the ROM boot loader, static RAM, sdram init, secondary bootloader, and so on, until the last "jump" to Linux. Most common non volatile boot devices would be introduced. A basic knowledge would be ok for the audience.