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

The Yocto Project


The Yocto Project is a more complex beast than Buildroot. Not only can it build toolchains, bootloaders, kernels, and root filesystems, as Buildroot can, but it can generate an entire Linux distribution for you, with binary packages that can be installed at runtime.

The Yocto Project is primarily a group of recipes, similar to Buildroot packages but written using a combination of Python and shell script, and a task scheduler called BitBake that produces whatever you have configured, from the recipes.

There is plenty of online documentation at https://www.yoctoproject.org/.

Background

The structure of the Yocto Project makes more sense if you look at the background first. Its roots are in OpenEmbedded, http://openembedded.org/ which, in turn, grew out of a number of projects to port Linux to various hand-held computers, including the Sharp Zaurus and Compaq iPaq. OpenEmbedded came to life in 2003 as the build system for those hand-held computers but quickly expanded to encompass...