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

Booting the kernel

Booting Linux is highly device-dependent. In this section, I will show you how it works for the Raspberry Pi 4, BeagleBone Black, and QEMU. For other target boards, you must consult the information from the vendor or from the community project, if there is one.

At this point, you should have the kernel image files and the device tree blobs for the Raspberry Pi 4, BeagleBone Black, and QEMU.

Booting the Raspberry Pi 4

Raspberry Pis use a proprietary bootloader provided by Broadcom instead of U-Boot. Unlike previous Raspberry Pi models, the Raspberry Pi 4's bootloader resides on an onboard SPI EEPROM rather than on a microSD card. We still need to put the kernel image and device tree blobs for the Raspberry Pi 4 on a microSD to boot our 64-bit kernel.

To begin, you need a microSD card with a FAT32 boot partition large enough to hold the necessary kernel build artifacts. The boot partition needs to be the first partition on the microSD card. A partition...