Book Image

Embedded Programming with Modern C++ Cookbook

By : Igor Viarheichyk
Book Image

Embedded Programming with Modern C++ Cookbook

By: Igor Viarheichyk

Overview of this book

Developing applications for embedded systems may seem like a daunting task as developers face challenges related to limited memory, high power consumption, and maintaining real-time responses. This book is a collection of practical examples to explain how to develop applications for embedded boards and overcome the challenges that you may encounter while developing. The book will start with an introduction to embedded systems and how to set up the development environment. By teaching you to build your first embedded application, the book will help you progress from the basics to more complex concepts, such as debugging, logging, and profiling. Moving ahead, you will learn how to use specialized memory and custom allocators. From here, you will delve into recipes that will teach you how to work with the C++ memory model, atomic variables, and synchronization. The book will then take you through recipes on inter-process communication, data serialization, and timers. Finally, you will cover topics such as error handling and guidelines for real-time systems and safety-critical systems. By the end of this book, you will have become proficient in building robust and secure embedded applications with C++.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Exploring lock-free synchronization

In the preceding recipes, we learned how to synchronize access of multiple threads to shared data, using mutexes and locks. If several threads try to run critical sections of the code protected by a lock, only one thread at a time can do it. All other threads have to wait until that thread leaves the critical section.

In some cases, however, it is possible to synchronize access to shared data without mutexes and explicit locks. The idea is to use a local copy of data for modification, and then update the shared copy in a single, uninterruptible, and undividable operation.

This type of synchronization depends on the hardware. Target processors should provide some form of Compare And Swap (CAS) instruction. This checks whether the value in a memory location matches a given value, and replaces it with a new given value only if they match. Since...