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 GNU debugger


GDB is a source-level debugger for the compiled languages, primarily C and C++, although there is also support for a variety of other languages such as Go and Objective. You should read the notes for the version of GDB you are using to find out the current status of support for the various languages. The project website is http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb and contains a lot of useful information, including the GDB manual.

Out of the box, GDB has a command-line user interface which some people find off-putting although, in reality, it is easy to use with a little practice. If command-line interfaces are not to your liking, there are a lot of front-end user interfaces to GDB and I will describe three of them later.