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

Summary


Every system needs a bootloader to bring the hardware to life and to load a kernel. U-Boot has found favor with many developers because it supports a useful range of hardware and it is fairly easy to port to a new device. Over the last few years, the complexity and ever increasing variety of embedded hardware has led to the introduction of the device tree as a way of describing hardware. The device tree is simply a textual representation of a system that is compiled into a devicetree binary (dtb) and which is passed to the kernel when it loads. It is up to the kernel to interpret the device tree and to load and initialize drivers for the devices it finds there.

In use, U-Boot is very flexible, allowing images to be loaded from mass storage, flash memory, or a network, and booted. Likewise, Barebox can achieve the same but with a smaller base of hardware support. Despite its cleaner design and POSIX-inspired internal APIs, at the time of writing it does not seem to have been accepted...