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

Chapter 19: Debugging with GDB

Bugs happen. Identifying and fixing them is part of the development process. There are many different techniques for finding and characterizing program defects, including static and dynamic analysis, code review, tracing, profiling, and interactive debugging. I will look at tracers and profilers in the next chapter, but here I want to concentrate on the traditional approach of watching code execution through a debugger, which in our case is the GNU Project Debugger (GDB). GDB is a powerful and flexible tool. You can use it to debug applications, examine the postmortem files (core files) that are created after a program crash, and even step through kernel code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • The GNU debugger
  • Preparing to debug
  • Debugging applications
  • Just-in-time debugging
  • Debugging forks and threads
  • Core files
  • GDB user interfaces
  • Debugging kernel code