Book Image

Embedded Programming with Modern C++ Cookbook

By : Igor Viarheichyk
Book Image

Embedded Programming with Modern C++ Cookbook

By: Igor Viarheichyk

Overview of this book

Developing applications for embedded systems may seem like a daunting task as developers face challenges related to limited memory, high power consumption, and maintaining real-time responses. This book is a collection of practical examples to explain how to develop applications for embedded boards and overcome the challenges that you may encounter while developing. The book will start with an introduction to embedded systems and how to set up the development environment. By teaching you to build your first embedded application, the book will help you progress from the basics to more complex concepts, such as debugging, logging, and profiling. Moving ahead, you will learn how to use specialized memory and custom allocators. From here, you will delve into recipes that will teach you how to work with the C++ memory model, atomic variables, and synchronization. The book will then take you through recipes on inter-process communication, data serialization, and timers. Finally, you will cover topics such as error handling and guidelines for real-time systems and safety-critical systems. By the end of this book, you will have become proficient in building robust and secure embedded applications with C++.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Configuring CPU frequency

The CPU frequency is an important parameter of the system that determines its performance and its power consumption. The higher the frequency, the more instructions the CPU can perform per second. But it comes with a cost. Higher frequency implies a higher power consumption that, in turn, means more heat that needs to be dissipated to avoid the processor overheating.

Modern processors are able to use different operating frequencies depending on their load. For computationally intense tasks, they use their maximum frequency to achieve the maximum performance, but when the system is mostly idle, they switch to lower frequencies to reduce both the power consumption and thermal impact.

Proper frequency selection is managed by the operating system. In this recipe, we will learn how to set the CPU frequency range and select a frequency governor in Linux to...