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

Introducing perf

perf is an abbreviation of the Linux performance event counter subsystem,
perf_events, and also the name of the command-line tool for interacting with
perf_events. Both have been part of the kernel since Linux 2.6.31. There is plenty of useful information in the Linux source tree in tools/perf/Documentation as well as at https://perf.wiki.kernel.org.

The initial impetus for developing perf was to provide a unified way to access the registers of the performance measurement unit (PMU), which is part of most modern processor cores. Once the API was defined and integrated into Linux, it became logical to extend it to cover other types of performance counters.

At its heart, perf is a collection of event counters with rules about when they actively collect data. By setting the rules, you can capture data from the whole system, just the kernel, or just one process and its children, and do it across all CPUs or just one CPU. It is very flexible. With this one tool, you...