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 (16 chapters)
15
Index

The init program


Running a shell, or even a shell script, at boot time is fine for simple cases, but really you need something more flexible. Normally, Unix systems run a program called init that starts up and monitors other programs. Over the years, there have been many init programs, some of which I will describe in Chapter 9, Starting up - the init Program. For now, I will briefly introduce the init from BusyBox.

init begins by reading the configuration file, /etc/inittab. Here is a simple example which is adequate for our needs:

::sysinit:/etc/init.d/rcS
::askfirst:-/bin/ash

The first line runs a shell script, rcS, when init is started. The second line prints the message Please press Enter to activate this console to the console, and starts a shell when you press Enter. The leading - before /bin/ash means that it will be a login shell, which sources /etc/profile and $HOME/.profile before giving the shell prompt. One of the advantages of launching the shell like this is that job control...