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

Memory mapping

Application software usually benefits from a number of abstractions available in the environment for the handling of memory. In modern operating systems on personal computers, each process can access its own memory space, which can also be relocated by remapping memory blocks to virtual memory addresses. Moreover, dynamic memory allocations are possible through virtual memory pools provided by the kernel. Embedded devices do not rely on these mechanisms, as there is no way to assign virtual addresses to physical memory locations. In all contexts and running modes, all the symbols can be accessed only by pointing at physical addresses.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, booting a bare-metal embedded application requires defining the sections at compile time within the assigned regions in the available address space, using the linker script. In order to properly configure the memory sections in our embedded software, it is important to analyze the properties of...