Product: 1784392537

The world of today is brimming with billions of devices (printers, webcams, home appliances etc.) running a form of the Linux OS called Embedded Linux. This particular flavor of Linux is customized for running in less than 16 megs of RAM and paltry amount of flash storage totalling a dozen megs or so. This might come as a rude surprise to anyone accustomed to gigs of RAM and terabytes of hard drive storage. Consequently, programming Embedded Linux requires throwing away old habits and learning how to make the most of available scarce resources. If you find yourself mulling a career in this challenging space, you just found the perfect book to take on your journey. The author starts from the basics and provides a concise overview of the norms in this field, from the CPU architectures to the major players manufacturing the chips. Though these architectures can be programmed for through using an emulator called QEMU, the author recommends getting the BeagleBone Black platform to get a hands-on experience to feel the real thing. Thankfully, this will be the only expense required since the software used throughout the book is open source. The author deals with the four facets of Embedded Linux: the toolchain (compilers, linkers etc.), the bootloader, the kernel and the root filesystem. Even though the reader will be trained on these aspects throughout the book, the author realises that doing this on a regular basis will be cumbersome for all but the most patient of people. Therefore, Buildroot and YoctoProject are explored showing how to automate the whole process. As long as low level systems programming in the C language is right up your alley, this book is your ticket to sailing all the way from development to debugging Embedded Linux solutions on any kind of supported hardware. The final chapter touches on real time programming, thus sweetening the pot even more.
Rating: 5
1784392537
Count: 7