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

Device nodes


Most devices in Linux are represented by device nodes, in accordance with the Unix philosophy that everything is a file (except network interfaces, which are sockets). A device node may refer to a block device or a character device. Block devices are mass storage devices such as SD cards or hard drives. A character device is pretty much anything else, once again with the exception of network interfaces. The conventional location for device nodes is the directory /dev. For example, a serial port may be represented by the device node /dev/ttyS0.

Device nodes are created using the program mknod (short for make node):

mknod <name> <type> <major> <minor>

name is the name of the device node that you want to create, type is either, c for character devices, and b for block. They each have a major number and a minor number which is used by the kernel to route file requests to the appropriate device driver code. There is a list of standard major and minor numbers...