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

No more rolling your own embedded Linux


The process of creating a system manually, as described in Chapter 5, Building a Root Filesystem, is called the roll your own (RYO) process. It has the advantage that you are in complete control of the software and you can tailor it to do anything you like. If you want it to do something truly odd but innovative, or if you want to reduce the memory footprint to the smallest possible, RYO is the way to go. But, in the vast majority of situations, building manually is a waste of time and produces inferior, unmaintainable systems.

They are usually built incrementally over a period of months, often undocumented and seldom recreated from scratch because nobody had a clue where each part came from.