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

Summary

Every system needs a bootloader to bring the hardware to life and to load a kernel. U-Boot has found favor with many developers because it supports a useful range of hardware and it is fairly easy to port to a new device. In this chapter, we learned how to inspect and drive U-Boot interactively from the command line over a serial console. These command-line exercises included loading a kernel over a network using TFTP for rapid iteration. Lastly, we learned how to port U-Boot to a new device by generating a patch for our Nova board.

Over the last few years, the complexity and ever-increasing variety of embedded hardware has led to the introduction of the device tree as a way of describing hardware. The device tree is simply a textual representation of a system that is compiled into a device tree binary (DTB), and which is passed to the kernel when it loads. It is up to the kernel to interpret the device tree and to load and initialize drivers for the devices it finds there...