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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

A better way of managing device nodes

Creating device nodes statically with mknod is hard work and inflexible. However, there are other ways to create device nodes automatically on demand:

  • devtmpfs: This is a pseudo filesystem that you mount over /dev at boot time. The kernel populates it with device nodes for all the devices that the kernel currently knows about. The kernel also creates nodes for new devices as they are detected at runtime. The nodes are owned by root and have default permissions of 0600. Some well-known device nodes, such as /dev/null and /dev/random, override the default to 0666. To see exactly how this is done, look at the drivers/char/mem.c file in the Linux source tree and observe how struct memdev is initialized.
  • mdev: This is a BusyBox applet that is used to populate a directory with device nodes and create new nodes as needed. There is an /etc/mdev.conf configuration file that contains rules for the ownership and mode of the nodes.
  • ...

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