Book Image

Instant Optimizing Embedded Systems Using BusyBox

Book Image

Instant Optimizing Embedded Systems Using BusyBox

Overview of this book

As hundreds of millions of people have started using Android smartphones, embedded Linux systems are becoming more and more popular. To get more market share, not only for hardware and function piling up, smartphone manufacturers gradually realized the importance of user experience. To improve user experience, the back-end Linux system must be optimized in many ways. Instant Optimizing Embedded System Using BusyBox is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear, step-by-step exercises to help you take advantage of the real power behind Busybox, and give you a good grounding for using it to optimize your embedded (Android Linux) systems. Moving on from the basics, this book will teach you how to configure and compile it from source code, including cross-compiling it with static linking and dynamic linking. You will also learn how to install and use Busybox on the Android emulator. You will learn to replace the simple Android mksh console with Busybox ash console and start a telnet and HTTP service provided by Busybox. You will also build embedded Linux file system from scratch and start it on Android emulator. We will take a look at how to add functionality to Busybox based system, including adding external applets to Busybox, as well as building development environments (like Bash and C) for it manually or with the automatic Buildroot system. If want to learn how to take advantage of using Busybox applets to optimize your embedded system, then this is the book for you for it will also show you how to use the powerful applets to optimize multiple aspects of an embedded (Android Linux) system.This book will teach you how to build an embedded (Android Linux) system with Busybox, enhance its functionality to meet diverse system requirements, and optimize it to provide a better user experience for embedded products.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Chapter 1. Instant Optimizing Embedded System Using BusyBox

Welcome to Instant Optimizing Embedded System Using BusyBox.

BusyBox is a popular Unix toolbox; it integrates tiny versions of many common Unix utilities. It can be easily configured and compiled into a small, single-binary executable file. The built-in utilities are also known as BusyBox applets; they can be easily installed on an embedded system to add functionality or optimize performance. They can together also be used to build new embedded systems with extra device nodes, configuration files, and a Linux kernel.

This book will walk you through the configuration, compiling, and installation of the single-binary Unix toolbox, BusyBox. We'll show its basic usage on a desktop development system and the Android emulator, build a bootable embedded system from scratch and boot it on a virtual Android device, discuss how to meet diverse function requirements of BusyBox-based embedded systems, and explore how to utilize some powerful built-in applets to optimize different aspects of an embedded system.

Throughout this book, Ubuntu, as the most popular Linux distribution, will be used as our default desktop development system. Android, as the most popular embedded Linux system, will be used as our target embedded system. Android emulator, as the easy and cheap way to get a running Android device with root permission, will be used to build the Android experiment platform for demonstration.