Book Image

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition

By : Frank Vasquez, Chris Simmonds
5 (3)
Book Image

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition

5 (3)
By: Frank Vasquez, Chris Simmonds

Overview of this book

If you’re looking for a book that will demystify embedded Linux, then you’ve come to the right place. Mastering Embedded Linux Programming is a fully comprehensive guide that can serve both as means to learn new things or as a handy reference. The first few chapters of this book will break down the fundamental elements that underpin all embedded Linux projects: the toolchain, the bootloader, the kernel, and the root filesystem. After that, you will learn how to create each of these elements from scratch and automate the process using Buildroot and the Yocto Project. As you progress, the book will show you how to implement an effective storage strategy for flash memory chips and install updates to a device remotely once it’s deployed. You’ll also learn about the key aspects of writing code for embedded Linux, such as how to access hardware from apps, the implications of writing multi-threaded code, and techniques to manage memory in an efficient way. The final chapters demonstrate how to debug your code, whether it resides in apps or in the Linux kernel itself. You’ll also cover the different tracers and profilers that are available for Linux so that you can quickly pinpoint any performance bottlenecks in your system. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll be able to create efficient and secure embedded devices using Linux.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Section 1: Elements of Embedded Linux
10
Section 2: System Architecture and Design Decisions
18
Section 3: Writing Embedded Applications
22
Section 4: Debugging and Optimizing Performance

Installing Python packages with pip

You now know how to define your project's dependencies in a setup.py script. But how do you install those dependencies? How do you upgrade a dependency or replace it when you find a better one? How do you decide when it is safe to delete a dependency you no longer need? Managing project dependencies is a tricky business. Luckily, Python comes with a tool called pip that can help, especially in the early stages of your project.

The initial 1.0 release of pip arrived on April 4, 2011, around the same time that
Node.js and npm were taking off. Before it became pip, the tool was named pyinstall. pyinstall was created in 2008 as an alternative to easy_install, which came bundled with setuptools at the time. easy_install is now deprecated and setuptools recommends using pip instead.

Since pip is included with the Python installer and you can have multiple versions of Python installed on your system (for example, 2.7 and 3.8), it helps to know...