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Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

By : Frank Vasquez, Chris Simmonds
4.6 (23)
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Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

4.6 (23)
By: Frank Vasquez, Chris Simmonds

Overview of this book

If you’re looking for a book that will demystify embedded Linux, then you’ve come to the right place. Mastering Embedded Linux Programming is a fully comprehensive guide that can serve both as means to learn new things or as a handy reference. The first few chapters of this book will break down the fundamental elements that underpin all embedded Linux projects: the toolchain, the bootloader, the kernel, and the root filesystem. After that, you will learn how to create each of these elements from scratch and automate the process using Buildroot and the Yocto Project. As you progress, the book will show you how to implement an effective storage strategy for flash memory chips and install updates to a device remotely once it’s deployed. You’ll also learn about the key aspects of writing code for embedded Linux, such as how to access hardware from apps, the implications of writing multi-threaded code, and techniques to manage memory in an efficient way. The final chapters demonstrate how to debug your code, whether it resides in apps or in the Linux kernel itself. You’ll also cover the different tracers and profilers that are available for Linux so that you can quickly pinpoint any performance bottlenecks in your system. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll be able to create efficient and secure embedded devices using Linux.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
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1
Section 1: Elements of Embedded Linux
10
Section 2: System Architecture and Design Decisions
18
Section 3: Writing Embedded Applications
22
Section 4: Debugging and Optimizing Performance

Chapter 18: Managing Memory

This chapter covers issues related to memory management, which is an important topic for any Linux system but especially for embedded Linux, where system memory is usually in limited supply. After a brief refresher on virtual memory, I will show you how to measure memory usage, how to detect problems with memory allocation, including memory leaks, and what happens when you run out of memory. You will have to understand the tools that are available, from simple tools such as free and top, to complex ones such as mtrace and Valgrind.

We will learn the difference between kernel and user space memory, and how the kernel maps physical pages of memory to the address space of a process. Then we will locate and read the memory maps for individual processes under the proc filesystem. We will see how the mmap system call can be used to map a program's memory to a file, so that it can allocate memory in bulk or share it with another process. In the second half...

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