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 Buildroot

The current versions of Buildroot are capable of building a toolchain, a bootloader, a kernel, and a root filesystem. It uses GNU Make as the principal build tool. There is good online documentation at https://buildroot.org/docs.html, including The Buildroot user manual at https://buildroot.org/downloads/manual/manual.html.

Background

Buildroot was one of the first build systems. It began as part of the uClinux and uClibc projects as a way of generating a small root filesystem for testing. It became a separate project in late 2001 and continued to evolve through to 2006, after which it went into a rather dormant phase. However, since 2009, when Peter Korsgaard took over stewardship, it has been developing rapidly, adding support for glibc-based toolchains and a greatly increased number of packages and target boards.

As a matter of interest, Buildroot is also the ancestor of another popular build system, OpenWrt (http://wiki.openwrt.org), which forked...