Bootloader
A bootloader is a small application that is first run when a computing device is powered on. the primary purpose of a bootloader is to initialize the hardware i/o enough so that the core of an operating system may be loaded and executed.
some example bootloaders are:
X86:
- Lilo
- Grub
- Syslinux
- U-Boot
ARM:
MIPS:
PowerPC: