Book Image

GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming

By : Rodolfo Giometti
Book Image

GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming

By: Rodolfo Giometti

Overview of this book

Embedded computers have become very complex in the last few years and developers need to easily manage them by focusing on how to solve a problem without wasting time in finding supported peripherals or learning how to manage them. The main challenge with experienced embedded programmers and engineers is really how long it takes to turn an idea into reality, and we show you exactly how to do it. This book shows how to interact with external environments through specific peripherals used in the industry. We will use the latest Linux kernel release 4.4.x and Debian/Ubuntu distributions (with embedded distributions like OpenWrt and Yocto). The book will present popular boards in the industry that are user-friendly to base the rest of the projects on - BeagleBone Black, SAMA5D3 Xplained, Wandboard and system-on-chip manufacturers. Readers will be able to take their first steps in programming the embedded platforms, using C, Bash, and Python/PHP languages in order to get access to the external peripherals. More about using and programming device driver and accessing the peripherals will be covered to lay a strong foundation. The readers will learn how to read/write data from/to the external environment by using both C programs or a scripting language (Bash/PHP/Python) and how to configure a device driver for a specific hardware. After finishing this book, the readers will be able to gain a good knowledge level and understanding of writing, configuring, and managing drivers, controlling and monitoring applications with the help of efficient/quick programming and will be able to apply these skills into real-world projects.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

The net tools


These tools are stored in the net-tools package, and they are a set of utility programs we can use to easily manipulate Ethernet devices. Inside this package, there are several programs, and few of them are specifically for Ethernet devices.

One of the most important Ethernet-related networking tool is ifconfig, which is used to configure a network interface. We already used it several times in this book to discover the available network interfaces on our system or just to set up our IP address.

Even if the ifconfig command can solve quite all the network settings, it's now deprecated, and a more powerful tool exists to replace it: the ip command (which is in the iproute2 package). This command can be used for every task we can do with ifconfig and much more! Just as a simple example, here is a command to show the list of active network addresses in the SAMA5D3 Xplained using the ip command:

root@a5d3:~# ip address list
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue...