You're reading from Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition

Product typeBook

Published inMay 2021

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781789530384

Edition3rd Edition

Concepts

Embedded Systems

Authors (2):

Frank Vasquez

Chris Simmonds

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After the kernel has booted

We saw in Chapter 4, Configuring and Building the Kernel, how the kernel bootstrap code seeks to find a root filesystem, either initramfs or a filesystem specified by root= on the kernel command line, and then executes a program that, by default, is /init for initramfs and /sbin/init for a regular filesystem. The init program has root privilege, and since it is the first process to run, it has a process ID (PID) of 1. If, for some reason, init cannot be started, the kernel will panic.

The init program is the ancestor of all other processes, as shown here by the pstree command running on a simple embedded Linux system:

# pstree -gn
init(1)-+-syslogd(63)
        |-klogd(66)
        |-dropbear(99)
        `-sh(100)---pstree(109)

The job of the init program is to take control of the boot process in user space and set it running. It...

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Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition

Published in: May 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781789530384

Authors (2)

Frank Vasquez

Frank Vasquez is an independent software consultant specializing in consumer electronics. He has over a decade of experience designing and building embedded Linux systems. During that time, he has shipped numerous devices including a rackmount DSP audio server, a diver-held sonar camcorder, and a consumer IoT hotspot. Before his career as an embedded Linux engineer, Frank was a database kernel developer at IBM where he worked on DB2. He lives in Silicon Valley.
Read more about Frank Vasquez

Chris Simmonds

Chris Simmonds is a software consultant and trainer living in southern England. He has almost two decades of experience in designing and building open-source embedded systems. He is the founder and chief consultant at 2net Ltd, which provides professional training and mentoring services in embedded Linux, Linux device drivers, and Android platform development. He has trained engineers at many of the biggest companies in the embedded world, including ARM, Qualcomm, Intel, Ericsson, and General Dynamics. He is a frequent presenter at open source and embedded conferences, including the Embedded Linux Conference and Embedded World.
Read more about Chris Simmonds

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