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

Porting Linux to a new board


The scope of the task depends on how similar your board is to an existing development board. In Chapter 3, All About Bootloaders we ported U-Boot to a new board, named Nova, which is based on the BeagleBone Black (when I say based, it actually is one) so, in this case, there are very few changes to the kernel code to be made. If you are porting to completely new and innovative hardware, there will be more to do. I am only going to consider the simple case.

The organization of architecture-specific code in arch/$ARCH differs from one system to another. The x86 architecture is pretty clean because hardware details are detected at runtime. The PowerPC architecture puts SoC and board-specific files in subdirectory platforms. The ARM architecture has the most board and SoC-specific files of all because there are a lot of ARM boards and SoCs. Platform-dependent code is in directories named mach-* in arch/arm, approximately one per SoC. There are other directories named...