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

The execution stack

As seen in the previous chapter, a bare-metal application starts executing with an empty stack area. The execution stack grows backward, from the high address provided at boot to lower addresses every time a new item is stored. The stack keeps track of the chain of function calls at all times by storing the branching point at each function call, but it also serves as temporary storage during function executions. Variables within the local scope of each function are stored inside the stack while the function is executing. For this reason, keeping stack usage under control is one of the most critical tasks while developing an embedded system.

Embedded programming requires us to be aware at all times of stack usage while coding. Placing big objects in the stack, such as communication buffers or long strings, is in general not a good idea, considering that the space for the stack is always very limited. The compiler can be instructed to produce a warning every time...