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

Problems with cross compiling


Sqlite3 is a well-behaved package and cross compiles nicely but not all packages are so tame. Typical pain points include:

  • Home-grown build systems, zlib, for example, has a configure script but it does not behave like the Autotools configure described in the previous section

  • Configure scripts that read pkg-config information, headers, and other files from the host, disregarding the --host override

  • Scripts that insist on trying to run cross compiled code

Each case requires careful analysis of the error and additional parameters to the configure script to provide the correct information or patches to the code to avoid the problem altogether. Bear in mind that one package may have many dependencies, especially with programs that have a graphical interface using GTK or QT or handle multimedia content. As an example, mplayer, which is a popular tool for playing multimedia content, has dependencies on over 100 libraries. It would take weeks of effort to build them all...