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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The art of cross-compiling

Having a working cross toolchain is the starting point of a journey, not the end of it. At some point, you will want to begin cross-compiling the various tools, applications, and libraries that you need on your target. Many of them will be open source packages, each of which has its own method of compiling and its own peculiarities.

There are some common build systems, including the following:

Pure makefiles, where the toolchain is usually controlled by the make variable CROSS_COMPILE
The GNU build system known as Autotools
CMake (https://cmake.org)

Both Autotools and makefiles are needed to build even a basic embedded Linux system. CMake is cross-platform and has seen increased adoption over the years especially among the C++ community. In this section, we will cover all three build tools.

Simple makefiles

Some important packages are very simple to cross-compile, including the Linux kernel, the U-Boot bootloader, and BusyBox...

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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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