Section 2.5. Chapter Summary

2.5. Chapter Summary

This chapter covered many subjects in a broad-brush fashion. Now you have a proper perspective for the material to follow in subsequent chapters. In later chapters, this perspective will be expanded to develop the skills and knowledge required to be successful in your next embedded project.

• Embedded systems share some common attributes. Often resources are limited, and user interfaces are simple or nonexistent, and are often designed for a specific purpose.

• The bootloader is a critical component of a typical embedded system. If your embedded system is based on a custom-designed board, you must provide a bootloader as part of your design. Often this is just a porting effort of an existing bootloader.

• Several software components are required to boot a custom board, including the bootloader and the kernel and file system image.

• Flash memory is widely used as a storage medium in embedded Linux systems. We introduced the concept of Flash memory and expand on this coverage in Chapters 9 and 10.

• An application program, also called a process, lives in its own virtual memory space assigned by the kernel. Application programs are said to run in user space.

• A properly equipped and configured cross-development environment is crucial to the embedded developer. We devote an entire chapter to this important subject in Chapter 12.

• You need an embedded Linux distribution to begin development of your embedded target. Embedded distributions contain many components, compiled and optimized for your chosen architecture.

2.5.1. Suggestions for Additional Reading

Linux Kernel Development, 2nd Edition
Robert Love
Novell Press, 2005

Understanding the Linux Kernel
Daniel P. Bovet & Marco Cesati
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 2002

Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager
Bruce Perens
Prentice Hall, 2004