Book Image

Embedded Systems Architecture - Second Edition

By : Daniele Lacamera
5 (1)
Book Image

Embedded Systems Architecture - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Daniele Lacamera

Overview of this book

Embedded Systems Architecture begins with a bird’s-eye view of embedded development and how it differs from the other systems that you may be familiar with. This book will help you get the hang of the internal working of various components in real-world systems. You’ll start by setting up a development environment and then move on to the core system architectural concepts, exploring system designs, boot-up mechanisms, and memory management. As you progress through the topics, you’ll explore the programming interface and device drivers to establish communication via TCP/IP and take measures to increase the security of IoT solutions. Finally, you’ll be introduced to multithreaded operating systems through the development of a scheduler and the use of hardware-assisted trusted execution mechanisms. With the help of this book, you will gain the confidence to work with embedded systems at an architectural level and become familiar with various aspects of embedded software development on microcontrollers—such as memory management, multithreading, and RTOS—an approach oriented to memory isolation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Introduction to Embedded Systems Development
4
Part 2 – Core System Architecture
8
Part 3 – Device Drivers and Communication Interfaces
13
Part 4 – Multithreading

System resource separation

The example operating system we have built throughout this chapter already has many interesting features, but it is still characterized by a flat model, with no memory segmentation or privilege separation. Minimalist systems do not provide any mechanisms to separate system resources and regulate access to the memory space. Instead, tasks in the system are allowed to perform any privileged operation, including reading and altering other tasks’ memory, executing operations in the address space of the kernel, and directly accessing peripherals and CPU registers at runtime.

Different approaches are available on the target platform, aimed at increasing the level of safety on the system by introducing a limited number of modifications to the kernel to:

  • Implement kernel/process privilege separation
  • Integrate memory protection in the scheduler
  • Provide a system call interface through the supervisor call to access resources

Let’...