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

Multiple boot stages

Booting a target through a bootloader is useful in several cases. In a real-life scenario, being able to update the running software on devices in a remote location means that developers are able to fix bugs and introduce new features after the first version of the embedded system has been deployed.

This represents a huge advantage for maintenance when a bug is discovered in the field, or when the software has to be re-engineered to adapt to changes in requirements. Bootloaders may implement automatic remote upgrades and other useful features, such as the following:

  • Loading of the application image from an external storage
  • Verification of the integrity of the application image before boot
  • Failover mechanisms in case of a corrupted application

Multiple bootloaders can be chained to perform a multiple-stage boot sequence. This allows you to have separate software images for the multiple boot stages, which can be uploaded to the flash independently...