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

Just-in-time debugging


Sometimes a program will start to misbehave after it has been running for a while and you would like to know what it is doing. The GDB attach feature does exactly that. I call it just-in-time debugging. It is available with both native and remote debug sessions.

In the case of remote debugging, you need to find the PID of the process to be debugged and pass it to gdbserver with the --attach option. For example, if the PID is 109 you would type:

# gdbserver --attach :10000 109
Attached; pid = 109
Listening on port 10000

That forces the process to stop as if it were at a breakpoint, allowing you to start your cross GDB in the normal way and connect to gdbserver.

When you are done you can detach, allowing the program to continue running without the debugger:

(gdb) detach
Detaching from program: /home/chris/MELP/helloworld/helloworld, process 109
Ending remote debugging.