Determine what is used to boot the OS on an Omnitik & what our recovery options are

[danry25]

It looks like MikroTik may be using a rebranded version of EtherBoot (called RouterBOOT) to initially load their firmware. Also, it appears that there are headers for either an rs232 connection, or for a jtag connection on the Omnitik board. I'll look further into this, as it is pertinent to recovering from a bad flash if one were to happen.

[danry25]

Just as an update, it appears we'll need to solder on headers to an Omnitik for the rs232 connectors.

[MertsA]

So this repo looks pretty dead but on the off chance you are interested in continuing to play with the Mikrotik, on their GPL page they have LinuxBIOS aka coreboot. You may want to look into that, in coreboot you have what's called a payload which usually is something like SeaBIOS which then boots the bootloader for your operating system. Back when coreboot was called LinuxBIOS the only payload was the Linux kernel so early on they were probably going straight from coreboot into the kernel. They might still be doing this which would make the architecture simpler but would mean that to flash a new kernel you have to overwrite the BIOS.

[danry25]

Yeah, from what I heard the recovery options if things go wrong were nearly non-existent, unlike if you have a bad flash with most other hardware.