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

Simple Ethernet bridging


Since our SAMA5D3 Xplained board has two Ethernet ports on board, it's quite interesting presenting a brief example of how we can set up a networking bridge on it in such a way as to connect two separate LANs into a single one. The idea is to set up our board in such a way that it can work as if it was (more or less) an Ethernet switch so that two separate LANs are physically merged into a bigger one in a transparent manner (that is, no special settings should be done on the networked devices on both LANs).

Note

For further information regarding what a bridge is, you should start by visiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridging_(networking) .

First of all, we need the package named bridge-utils, which holds the needed commands to enable the bridging functionality. The package holds the brctl command, which is used to set up our bridge (if it is missing, we can install the package using the usual installation commands).

Creating the bridge is quite simple. First of...