Book Image

Embedded Linux Development Using Yocto Project Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Alex Gonzalez
Book Image

Embedded Linux Development Using Yocto Project Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Alex Gonzalez

Overview of this book

The Yocto Project has become the de facto distribution build framework for reliable and robust embedded systems with a reduced time to market.You'll get started by working on a build system where you set up Yocto, create a build directory, and learn how to debug it. Then, you'll explore everything about the BSP layer, from creating a custom layer to debugging device tree issues. In addition to this, you’ll learn how to add a new software layer, packages, data, scripts, and configuration files to your system. You will then cover topics based on application development, such as using the Software Development Kit and how to use the Yocto project in various development environments. Toward the end, you will learn how to debug, trace, and profile a running system. This second edition has been updated to include new content based on the latest Yocto release.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Exploring Yocto's tracing and profiling tools


Tracing and profiling tools are used to increase the performance, efficiency, and quality of both, applications and systems. User space tracing and profiling tools make use of performance counters and static and dynamic tracing functionality that the Linux kernel offers, as we have seen in the previous recipes.

Getting ready

Tracing enables us to log an application's activity so that its behavior can be analyzed, optimized, and corrected.

Yocto offers several tracing tools including:

  • trace-cmd: This is a command-line interface to the ftrace kernel subsystem, and kernelshark, a graphical interface to trace-cmd.
  • perf: This is a tool that originated in the Linux kernel as a command-line interface to its performance counter events subsystem. It has since then expanded and added several other tracing mechanisms.
  • blktrace: This is a tool that provides information about the block layer input/output.
  • Linux Trace Toolkit Next Generation (LTTng): This is a tool...