Book Image

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

By : Chris Simmonds
Book Image

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

By: Chris Simmonds

Overview of this book

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming takes you through the product cycle and gives you an in-depth description of the components and options that are available at each stage. You will begin by learning about toolchains, bootloaders, the Linux kernel, and how to configure a root filesystem to create a basic working device. You will then learn how to use the two most commonly used build systems, Buildroot and Yocto, to speed up and simplify the development process. Building on this solid base, the next section considers how to make best use of raw NAND/NOR flash memory and managed flash eMMC chips, including mechanisms for increasing the lifetime of the devices and to perform reliable in-field updates. Next, you need to consider what techniques are best suited to writing applications for your device. We will then see how functions are split between processes and the usage of POSIX threads, which have a big impact on the responsiveness and performance of the final device The closing sections look at the techniques available to developers for profiling and tracing applications and kernel code using perf and ftrace.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Embedded Linux Programming
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Kernel preemption


The preemption latency occurs because it is not always safe or desirable to preempt the current thread of execution and call the scheduler. Mainline Linux has three settings for preemption, selected via the Kernel Features | Preemption Model menu:

  • CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE: no preemption

  • CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY: enables additional checks for requests for preemption

  • CONFIG_PREEMPT: allows the kernel to be preempted

With preemption set to none, kernel code will continue without rescheduling until it either returns via a syscall back to user space, where preemption is always allowed, or it encounters a sleeping wait which stops the current thread. Since it reduces the number of transitions between the kernel and user space and may reduce the total number of context switches, this option results in the highest throughput at the expense of large preemption latencies. It is the default for servers and some desktop kernels where throughput is more important than responsiveness.

The second...