EMBEDDED SYSTEM

LINUX ON EMBEDDED
SYSTEM
HCMUTE – Faculty of Mechanical Engineering
Lecturer: PhD. Bui Ha Duc

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Linux vs Windows
• First look - Graphic user interface:

Windows Linux
Ubuntu

Linux Linux
Fedora Debian
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Linux vs Windows
• First look - Terminal:

Linux Terminal
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Linux vs Windows
Linux Windows
Open Source; $$
“Free” to distribute, download, modify
Can be installed on a wide variety of On PC's desktops, laptops, servers
computer hardware (mobile phones, and some phones
tablet computers, video game
consoles, supercomputers)
File system support: Ext2, Ext3, Ext4 File system support: FAT, FAT32,
NTFS
Text command: BASH Text command: DOS – like commands
User interface: GNOME or KDE Windows Aero
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Linux Kernel
• Kernel is the core of Linux operating systems
• Official website:
https://www.kernel.org/
• OS based on Linux kernel – Linux Distributions
• E.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, Red hat, Debian…

• Almost 600 Linux distributions exist.

• Kernel versions:
• Linux 2.6.x: Friendly Arm

• Linux 3.4.x: Orange Pi

• Linux 4.x: Raspberry, BeagleBone

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Linux Kernel
• Check your linux kernel:
• Open terminal
• Type “uname –r”
2.6.32-431.11.2.el6.x86_64
Kernel Version Major Revision Minor Revision

• Newer version has: new features, enhancements, bug

fixes, apps
Can we modify Linux Kernel ?
When ? How ?
Debug, add drivers, modify modules
How to install Linux OS to embedded system ?
Depend on board. Not easy as install linux on computer !
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• OS for embedded system

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Linux Kernel Organization

• /drivers: largest folder, contains drivers for numerous

hardware

• /arch: next largest, contains support for processors

architectures
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Ubuntu desktop
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Ubuntu desktop
Generic Architecture of an Embedded
Linux System

Read Request

Boot Loader

IDE H/W Interrupt

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Linux File System

• Top-level Directory:

• /bin: Contains executable binary, commands used by all

the users of the system are located here
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Linux File System

• /sbin: contains executable binary files used typically by
system administrator, for system maintenance purpose.

• /etc: contains configuration files required by all programs,

startup and shutdown shell scripts

• /dev: contains device files

• E.g. /dev/tty1, /dev/usbmon0
• /proc: contains information about running system process

• /home: store user personal files

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Linux File System

• /boot: contains boot loader related files

• /usr: contains binaries, libraries, documentation, and

source code for second level programs.

• /opt: contains add-on applications from user, individual

vendors

• Refer to this link for more information

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/09/linux-file-system-structure/?utm_source=tuicool
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Warm up
• Open Ubuntu -> Files -> Home

• Create a new folder name “bai_tap”

• Open Text Editor

• Type “Hello world” and save as a new file name “bt_1” in

Home folder
• Right click on “bt_1”. Select Properties -> Permission

• Change Owner Acess to Read Only, then Close

• Try to edit the file and save it

• Try to create a new file

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Linux Terminal
• The command line is an interesting beast
• Most of time you communicate with the embedded board
via Terminal
• Terminal use BASH language
• Linux ignores the extension and looks inside the file to
determine what type of file it is.
• Linux is Case Sensitive
e.g. file1.TXT ≠ file1.txt
• Careful with space in file names
• The Linux command line does not have an undo feature.
Perform destructive actions carefuly.
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Linux Terminal
Useful commands: Absolute and Relative Paths
• pwd – Print Working Directory Absolute paths specify a
user@bash: pwd location (file or directory) in
relation to the root directory,
/home/haduc always begin with a forward
• ls – list all folders and files in the slash ( / )
working directory e.g. /home/ryan
user@bash: ls Relative paths specify a
location (file or directory) in
bin Documents public_html relation to where we currently
user@bash: ls -l /etc are in the system, not begin
• cd [location] – move to the [location with a slash.
folder] e.g. Documents
e.g. cd /usr/local/bin
cd ../games
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Linux Terminal
• man <command> - Look up the manual page for a
particular command.
• mkdir [options] <Directory> - Create a new folder
e.g. mkdir chuyende
• rmdir [options] <Directory> - Remove a folder
• touch [options] <filename> - Create a blank file
• cp [options] <source> <destination> - copy a file or
folder
• mv [options] <source> <destination> - move a file or
folder
• rm [options] <file> - remove a file
• gedit <file> - open Text Editor to edit file
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Linux Terminal
Permission: specify what a particular person may or may
not do with respect to a file or directory

- : file permissions permissions permissions

d : folder for the owner for groups for others
• r read - you may view the contents of the file.
• w write - you may change the contents of the file.
• x execute - you may execute or run the file if it is a program or
script.
• chmod [permissions] [path] - change permissions on a
file or directory
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Linux Terminal
• chown [option] [path] – Change the ownership of a file
or directory
E.g. to change the owner of /foo and subfiles to “root”, run:
chown -R root /foo
E.g. get permission to modify /var/www/html :
sudo chown -R pi:pi /var/www/html
• passwd – change user password
• su – switch from user to root account
• exit – return to user account
• history – display all previous command
• clear – clear the terminal screen
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Linux Terminal
• df – shows the size, used space, and available space on
the mounted filesystems
e.g. df -h -> show list of file system
• echo – print a string or string variable on terminal screen
e.g. echo Hello
echo $PATH
echo $HOME
• grep – searches for lines which contain a search pattern
e.g grep train *.txt
→ searching for the word “train” in all
text files in the current directory
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Linux Terminal
• Unzip Files in Linux
• Installing unzip
sudo apt-get install unzip
• Unzip a file
unzip filename.zip

• Download file from web

• Installing wget
sudo apt-get install wget
• Download file with wget
wget http://website.com/files/file.zip
e.g. Download opencv from web
wget https://github.com/opencv/opencv/archive/3.2.0.zip -O opencv_source.zip
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Create your 1st program on Linux

• Move file “bt_1” to “bai_tap” folder.
• Open “bt_1” with Text editor
• Type the source code for the program as follows:

• Save as “hello.c”.
• On Terminal, move to “bai_tap” folder and type
gcc -o hello hello.c
• To run the program, type
./hello
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“Hello World” Program Explain

Need to include stdio.h

The code is compiled with GCC compiler

$ gcc -o hello hello.c
And create a binary file named “hello”
hello.c

When we type a command on the command line, the system runs through a
preset series of directories, looking for the program we specified.

To override this behavior, we can provide path for the program with “./”
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Compile “hello” program

• Method 1: type command
gcc -o hello hello.c
Useful when compile simple program

• Method 2: Create and run a Makefile

Very useful when build a program that may need various
modules/source files.

• Method 3: use automake and autoconf

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Makefile
• Makefile is a program building tool which runs on Unix,
Linux
• Makefile simplify the procedure of building a program that
may need various modules.
• Makefile determine how the modules need to be compiled
or recompiled together
• For example, let’s assume we have the following source
files:
• main.cpp
• hello.cpp
• factorial.cpp
• functions.h
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Makefile
• We can compile using command:
gcc main.cpp hello.cpp factorial.cpp -o hello
But need to careful about the sequence of the function
calls.

What happen if we have few hundred source files?

• Makefile:
CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -g
hello: main.cpp hello.cpp factorial.cpp
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $? -o $@
clean:
-rm *.o hello
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Makefile
CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -g
target hello: main.cpp hello.cpp factorial.cpp
action $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $? -o $@
clean:
rm *.o hello

• Structure of target:
target: dependencies
• Action lines should start after a tab
• CC, CFLAGS: Macro, need to predefine
• E.g. CC = gcc Program for compiling C programs
CFLAGS = -g Extra flags to give to the C compiler
LDFLAGS = -lGL Extra flags to give to compiler when they
are supposed to invoke the linker
Refer to this link for more detail on macro
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/makefile/makefile_macros.htm
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Makefile
CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -g
target hello: main.cpp hello.cpp factorial.cpp
action $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $? -o $@
clean:
rm *.o hello

• $@ : is the name of the file to be made.

• $? : is the names of the changed source files

• Run the makefile by command: make or make hello

• Clear target: determine what will be done when command
make clean is called
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Example
• What will happen if this makefile is called ?

CC=gcc
OUTPUT=Hello
all:Hello.o display.o
$(CC) -o $(OUTPUT) Hello.o display.o
Hello.o:Hello.c
$(CC) -c Hello.c
display.o:display.c
$(CC) -c display.c
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CMake
• CMake is a meta build system.
(refer to https://cgold.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/cmake-can.html for more info)

• Installing Cmake
sudo apt-get -y install cmake
• Compile a project with Cmake
• Step 1: create an empty folder and put your code files into it
• Step 2: create a CMakeLists.txt in the same folder
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CMake
• Step 3: Open CMakeLists.txt, insert following lines

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)

# set the project name

project(Example)
# Find the require packet (e.g. opencv)
find_package( OpenCV REQUIRED )

# Set the include folder (e.g. opencv include folder)

include_directories( ${OpenCV_INCLUDE_DIRS} )

# Add the executable

add_executable(example example.cpp)

# Add library (e.g. opencv library)

target_link_libraries(example ${OpenCV_LIBS} )
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CMake
• Step 4: Build the project
cmake .
make
• Step 5: Recompile if the source code is changed
make