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Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Second Edition

By : Chris Simmonds
4.3 (12)
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Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

4.3 (12)
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. 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 (23 chapters)
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Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Identifying memory leaks


A memory leak occurs when memory is allocated but not freed when it is no longer needed. Memory leakage is by no means unique to embedded systems, but it becomes an issue partly because targets don't have much memory in the first place and partly because they often run for long periods of time without rebooting, allowing the leaks to become a large puddle.

You will realize that there is a leak when you run free or top and see that free memory is continually going down even if you drop caches, as shown in the preceding section. You will be able to identify the culprit (or culprits) by looking at the Uss and Rss per process.

There are several tools to identify memory leaks in a program. I will look at two: mtrace and Valgrind.

mtrace

mtrace is a component of glibc that traces calls to malloc, free, and related functions, and identifies areas of memory not freed when the program exits. You need to call the mtrace() function from within the program to begin tracing and then...

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