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

Product typeBook
Published inMay 2021
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781789530384
Edition3rd Edition
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Authors (2):
Frank Vasquez
Frank Vasquez
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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
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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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Mounting the root filesystem using NFS

If your device has a network interface, it is often useful to mount the root filesystem over the network during development. It gives you access to the almost unlimited storage on your host machine, so you can add in debug tools and executables with large symbol tables. As an added bonus, updates made to the root filesystem on the development machine are made available on the target immediately. You can also access all the target's log files from the host.

To begin with, you need to install and configure an NFS server on your host. On Ubuntu, the package to install is named nfs-kernel-server:

$ sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server

The NFS server needs to be told which directories are being exported to the network; this is controlled by /etc/exports. There is one line for each export. The format is described in the manual page exports(5). As an example, to export the root filesystem on my host, I have this:

/home/chris/rootfs *(rw...
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Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition
Published in: May 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781789530384

Authors (2)

author image
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

author image
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