It is available for a number of computer architectures, including M68000, ARM, Blackfin, MicroBlaze, AArch64, MIPS, Nios II, SuperH, PPC, RISC-V, LoongArch and x86.

from the serial port or network, manipulate device trees, and work with environment variables (which can be written to persistent storage, and are used to control U-Boot behavior such as the default boot command and timeout before auto-booting, as well as hardware data such as the Ethernet MAC address).

Unlike PC bootloaders which obscure or automatically choose the memory locations of the kernel and other boot data, U-Boot requires its boot commands to explicitly specify the physical memory addresses as destinations for copying data (kernel, ramdisk, device tree, etc.)

On some embedded device implementations, the CPU or SoC will locate and load the bootloader (such as Das U-Boot) from the boot partition (such as ext4 or FAT filesystems) directly.

U-Boot includes support for these filesystems: Device tree is a data structure for describing hardware layout.

The ability to run mainline software practically gives customers indemnity against lack of vendor updates.

In 2002 a previous version of the source code was briefly forked into a product called ARMBoot, but was merged back into the PPCBoot project shortly thereafter.

This marked the last release under the PPCBoot name, as it was renamed to reflect its ability to work on other architectures besides the PPC ISA.