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

U-Boot


U-Boot, or to give its full name, Das U-Boot, began life as an open source bootloader for embedded PowerPC boards. Then, it was ported to ARM-based boards and later to other architectures, including MIPS, SH, and x86. It is hosted and maintained by Denx Software Engineering. There is plenty of information available, and a good place to start is www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot. There is also a mailing list at .

Building U-Boot

Begin by getting the source code. As with most projects, the recommended way is to clone the git archive and check out the tag you intend to use which, in this case, is the version that was current at the time of writing:

$ git clone git://git.denx.de/u-boot.git
$ cd u-boot
$ git checkout v2015.07

Alternatively, you can get a tarball from ftp://ftp.denx.de/pub/u-boot/.

There are more than 1,000 configuration files for common development boards and devices in the configs/ directory. In most cases, you can make a good guess of which to use, based...