COMPUTER TECH. SKILLS

Linux Kernel Programming for Embedded Systems

Nº
DATE: CALL
PRICE NIS: 4350 + VAT
DURATION: 5 Days

Linux Kernel Programming for Embedded Systems.pdf

Course Overview:

The GNU / Linux operating system is the Operating System of choice for many embedded and real time developers: the main reasons being that the source code is free, there are no runtime royalties and it is a robust reliable operating system with excellent networking support.
This course focuses on Embedded Linux and Advanced Kernel Programming, including device drivers, and RT topics.

Who should attend?

Embedded and RT programmers developing devices using the Linux kernel and driver developers for internal or external peripherals.

Prerequisities:

- Linux Basics, Linux Introduction or equivalent. Linux Systems Programming or equivalent.
- Knowledge of C or C++

Course Outline:

1. Kernel Introduction

System overview and role of the kernel
Supported hardware architectures

2. Kernel Architecture

Supervisor mode vs. User mode
System Calls
Task Scheduling
Scheduling priorities, Real-time
Kernel Preemption
NPTL Threads
I/O scheduler

3. Configuring and Building the Linux Kernel

Getting the source
Structure of source files
Configuring the kernel
Compiling the kernel

4. Cross-Compiling for Embedded

Embedded Tool-chains
Cross-compiling for the Target Platform
Linux boot process
Kernel parameters
Bootloaders
Root filesystem over NFS

5. Module Programming

Module Programming basics
Building Kernel modules
Lab: “Hello world” module
Module utilities
Kernel log, printk
Module parameters
Lab: “Hello world” module with parameters
Kernel symbols
Device System Calls
Working with User Space memory
Implementing a /proc reader/writer
Lab: Module with /proc interface

6. Kernel Space Considerations

Endianess
Floating point
Execution contexts

7. Synchronicity

Sleeping, wait queues
Locking (semaphores, mutex, spinlocks)
Atomic operations

8. Kernel Memory Management

Virtual memory overview
Physical vs. Virtual memory, on-demand paging
kmalloc /kfree / vmalloc / vfree
Allocating pages
SLAB/SLUB/SLOB Allocators

9. Interrupts

Interrupt Control
IRQ Flags
Interrupt Handling
Top and Bottom Halves
SoftIRQs, Work Queues and TaskLets

10. Device Drivers

Types of device drivers
Device files, major and minor numbers
Device numbers allocation
Creating device files
Character Device Drivers
Registering a character device
File operations
Lab: Implementing a character device
An introduction to block device drivers
Simple block driver example

11. I/O memory, ports & DMA

Using I/O ports
Using I/O memory
DMA memory constraints
Memory address translations

12. Timing

Jiffies
Timers
High-Resolution Timers

13. Networking

Linux Networking model
The network stack
Sk_buff structure & operations
Net_device structure
Network device registration / unregistration
Device initialization
Packet transmit path
Packet receive path
Simple Network device driver example

14. Debugging

Kernel Debugging techniques
Handling Oops and Panics

15. Summary

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