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

Creating a boot ramdisk


A Linux boot ramdisk, strictly speaking, an initial RAM filesystem or initramfs, is a compressed cpio archive. cpio is an old Unix archive format, similar to TAR and ZIP but easier to decode and so requiring less code in the kernel. You need to configure your kernel with CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD to support initramfs.

In fact, there are three different ways to create a boot ramdisk: as a standalone cpio archive, as a cpio archive embedded in the kernel image, and as a device table which the kernel build system processes as part of the build. The first option gives the most flexibility because we can mix and match kernels and ramdisks to our hearts content. However, it means that you have two files to deal with instead of one and not all bootloaders have the facility to load a separate ramdisk. I will show you how to build one into the kernel later.

Standalone ramdisk

The following sequence of instructions creates the archive, compresses it and adds a U-Boot header ready...