Configure or flash FPGA ?

This article explain the difference between flashing FPGA and configuring FPGA.

figure 1 - Flash and FPGA

• Configure FPGA : At power on, the FPGA is not configured. FPGA configuration is the action of transfering the bitstream from the processor RAM to the FPGA.
• Flash firmware : It is possible to save the FPGA configuration under the Flash memory of the APF. Flashing firmware is the action of transfering the bitstream from the processor RAM to the flash memory.
• Auto-load : It is possible to configure U-Boot to configure the FPGA with the configuration saved in Flash memory on the boot. To do that simply set the U-Boot environment variable firmware_autoload to 1 :

 BIOS> setenv firmware_autoload 1
 BIOS> saveenv