Book Image

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition

By : Frank Vasquez, Chris Simmonds
5 (3)
Book Image

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition

5 (3)
By: Frank Vasquez, Chris Simmonds

Overview of this book

If you’re looking for a book that will demystify embedded Linux, then you’ve come to the right place. Mastering Embedded Linux Programming is a fully comprehensive guide that can serve both as means to learn new things or as a handy reference. The first few chapters of this book will break down the fundamental elements that underpin all embedded Linux projects: the toolchain, the bootloader, the kernel, and the root filesystem. After that, you will learn how to create each of these elements from scratch and automate the process using Buildroot and the Yocto Project. As you progress, the book will show you how to implement an effective storage strategy for flash memory chips and install updates to a device remotely once it’s deployed. You’ll also learn about the key aspects of writing code for embedded Linux, such as how to access hardware from apps, the implications of writing multi-threaded code, and techniques to manage memory in an efficient way. The final chapters demonstrate how to debug your code, whether it resides in apps or in the Linux kernel itself. You’ll also cover the different tracers and profilers that are available for Linux so that you can quickly pinpoint any performance bottlenecks in your system. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll be able to create efficient and secure embedded devices using Linux.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Section 1: Elements of Embedded Linux
10
Section 2: System Architecture and Design Decisions
18
Section 3: Writing Embedded Applications
22
Section 4: Debugging and Optimizing Performance

Summary

I know that was a lot to absorb. And trust me – this is just the beginning. Yocto is a never-ending rabbit hole that you don't climb out of. The recipes and tools are constantly changing and much of the documentation, while there is lots of it, is sadly out of date. Luckily, there is devtool, which automates much of the tedium and mistakes of
copy-paste development away. If you use the tools provided for you and continually save your work to your own layers, Yocto doesn't have to be painful. Before you know it, you'll be rolling your own distro layer and running your own remote package server.

A remote package server is just one way to deploy packages and applications. We will learn about a few others later in Chapter 16, Packaging Python. Despite the title, some of the techniques we'll look at in that chapter (for example, conda and Docker) apply to any programming language. While package managers are great for development, runtime package management...