Book Image

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Second Edition

By : Chris Simmonds
Book Image

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Second Edition

By: Chris Simmonds

Overview of this book

Embedded Linux runs many of the devices we use every day, from smart TVs to WiFi routers, test equipment to industrial controllers - all of them have Linux at their heart. Linux is a core technology in the implementation of the inter-connected world of the Internet of Things. The comprehensive guide shows you the technologies and techniques required to build Linux into embedded systems. You will begin by learning about the fundamental elements that underpin all embedded Linux projects: the toolchain, the bootloader, the kernel, and the root filesystem. You’ll see how to create each of these elements from scratch, and how to automate the process using Buildroot and the Yocto Project. Moving on, you’ll find out how to implement an effective storage strategy for flash memory chips, and how to install updates to the device remotely once it is deployed. You’ll also get to know the key aspects of writing code for embedded Linux, such as how to access hardware from applications, the implications of writing multi-threaded code, and techniques to manage memory in an efficient way. The final chapters show you how to debug your code, both in applications and in the Linux kernel, and how to profile the system so that you can look out for performance bottlenecks. By the end of the book, you will have a complete overview of the steps required to create a successful embedded Linux system.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Interrupt shielding

Using threaded interrupt handlers helps mitigate interrupt overhead by running some threads at a higher priority than interrupt handlers that do not impact real-time tasks. If you are using a multi-core processor, you can take a different approach and shield one or more cores from processing interrupts completely, allowing them to be dedicated to real-time tasks instead. This works either with a normal Linux kernel or a PREEMPT_RT kernel.

Achieving this is a question of pinning the real-time threads to one CPU and the interrupt handlers to a different one. You can set the CPU affinity off a thread or process using the command-line tool taskset, or you can use the sched_setaffinity(2) and pthread_setaffinity_np(3) functions.

To set the affinity of an interrupt, first note that there is a subdirectory for each interrupt number in /proc/irq/<IRQ number>...