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Mastering Embedded Linux Development

Mastering Embedded Linux Development

By : Frank Vasquez, Mr. Chris Simmonds
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Mastering Embedded Linux Development

Mastering Embedded Linux Development

By: Frank Vasquez, Mr. Chris Simmonds

Overview of this book

Mastering Embedded Linux Development' is designed to be both a learning resource and a reference for your embedded Linux projects. The book starts by breaking down the fundamental elements that underpin all embedded Linux projects: the toolchain, the bootloader, the kernel, and the root filesystem. First, you will download and install a pre-built toolchain. After that, you will cross-compile each of the remaining three elements from scratch and learn to automate the process using Buildroot and the Yocto Project. The book progresses with coverage of over-the-air software updates and rapid prototyping with add-on boards. Two new chapters tackle modern development practices including Python packaging and deploying containerized applications. These are followed by a chapter on writing multithreaded code and another on techniques to manage memory in an efficient way. The final chapters demonstrate how to debug your code, whether it resides in user space or in the Linux kernel itself. In addition to GDB, the book also covers 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 book, you will be able to create efficient and secure embedded devices with Linux that will delight your users.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
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1
Part 1: Elements of Embedded Linux
7
Part 2: Building Embedded Linux Images
11
Part 3: System Architecture and Design Decisions
18
Part 4: Developing Applications
23
Part 5: Debugging and Optimizing Performance

How much memory does my application use?

As with kernel space, the different ways of allocating, mapping, and sharing user-space memory make it quite difficult to answer this seemingly simple question.

To begin, you can ask the kernel how much memory it thinks is available, which you can do using the free command. Here is a typical example of the output:

        total        used   free shared buffers cached
Mem:   509016      504312   4704 0      26456   363860
-/+ buffers/cache: 113996 395020
Swap:       0           0      0

At first sight, this looks like a system that is almost out of memory, with only 4,704 KB free out of 509,016 KB: less than 1%. However, note that 26,456 KB is in buffers and a whopping 363,860 KB is in caches. Linux believes that free memory is wasted memory; the kernel uses free memory for buffers and caches with the knowledge that they can be shrunk when the need arises. Removing buffers and cache from the measurement provides true free memory...

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