Customer Reviews

Building Embedded Linux Systems

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Entering the world of embedded Linux development was a daunting task not too long ago, since information was spread thinnly across the web, and books were not readily available. Several books have appeared recently, and a couple are ok, but this book is the most thorough available to date. It covers all important aspects of the development process, from concepts to debugging, with toolchain building, the kernel, bootloaders, networking and root file systems in between. I would highly recommend this book. It has been extremely helpful to me.

I am (and have been since October) in the midst of new hardware bring up. I am not a LINUX novice but performing a kernel bring up -- well let's just say I assembled a number of books in preparation of the project.

Forturnately for me, this book was one I selected.

I found the text to be be thorough (w/plenty of references to other texts, also by O'Reilly) starting with the general and moving on to specifics.

I like the order of the presentations. Often times I find the next chapter the next task confronting me.

Good Job Mr. Yaghmour!!!

You saved me a lot of pain.

Well worth the money.
Warrick Lacey

This book is a good starting point for people to understand the work of embedded linux engineers in the real world. It is also a great book for experienced people in the industry as they can collect various pieces of missing information. I just wish I had this book two years back when I learnt all this stuff the hardway through pieces of information on web. Technology changes fast, but the stuff mentioned in the book is still up to date in the industry.

I found this book a "must read" if you are even thinking about embedded linux. Karim's discussions about flash devices and files systems is information you could spend weeks aquiring else where.

I bought this book when I had very little idea about embedded Linux systems. I tried reading it but found that its explanation of all available options / flavors, while informative, was unhelpful in trying to answer the question "what would i use to make a system of my own?". E.g. it talked about cramfs, jffs2 etc. but didn't quite address the issue of why i would choose one over the other and under which circumstances: e.g. a typical development system should use rootfs over NFS to allow for rapid iterative development and then switch to a flash based / sd-card based system for deployment (cramfs / jffs2 depending on the space constraint). A similar argument extends to uClibC vs. glibc etc.

Over the years, as I've gained experience with several embedded systems, the book's collection of all terms makes more sense, but more like an encyclopedia and a reference. I feel it still doesn't provide enough guidance on what would make a good embedded system: if i selected from the options presented, say cramfs on MIPS booting off sd-card, would i be tying locking myself into a hole? this information is better gained the hard way: looking at what platforms are already available and how active the support groups are for these.

Also, in the recent years, OpenEmbedded (OE) seems to have a strong developer push behind it. This book doesn't cover it at all.

I think the information in the book would be best complimented if the author paired the book material with a system that the readers could buy and build on their own as they read through the chapters. Yes, it would only be one specific selection from all options the book talks about, but I believe the process would be much more enlightening.

I found this book to give a well-rounded discussion of (as the title says) building embedded LINUX systems. The author does a good job presenting the material and nicely presents concepts that non-experts can quickly grasp. The book covers: basic concepts, hardware support, development tools, kernel considerations, and file management topics. It also covers bootloader, networking, and debugging tools. I would have preferred more coverage on the debugging tools. Yaghmour did a good job in explaining his ideas. I did not need to refer to other LINUX books to have terminology explained. Chapter 7 was particularly insightful in its discussion of memory storage (flash) devices.

The book is very practical (hand's on) in its approach. I recommend it highly for the person developing embedded LINUX systems. I don't think that you'll be disappointed.

Even if you already have development tools, this text is helpful for administering an embedded Linux device, or for locating applications/daemons to run on an embedd Linux device. This text deals with different architectures, like ARM etc.

On the one hand, a typical Linux user is going to install a pre-built package (Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu, etc) on pre-built PC. This book isn't for them - there are plenty of books for learning and using Linux.

On the other hand, embedded systems developers often have a good, working toolchain from a vendor like WindRiver or DataLight. This book isn't necessarily for them, either.

But if you're building your own system: your own DIO controllers, perhaps with a mix of flash drives and conventional storage, perhaps remote booting ... and if you've decided to use Open Source as your platform ...
then you NEED this book.

There simply isn't any other text out there that covers the breadth of subjects (toolchain, kernel build, kernel tailoring, media types, etc etc etc) with the wealth of details as this book.

It's an excellent book, and an indispensible resource.

I read this book in about 2 hours and the contents really disappoint me. I expected the book to discuss in details of the issues related to embedded linux. And to a degree, this book is like a dictionary of all the terms you might encounter during the development and only a few direct examples. And given how fast the Linux kernel, open source packages evolve over time, the examples given in this book is totally outdated.

A lot of the topics talked about in this book you probably already faced on the desktop, and would be totally useless to someone who has done projects like LinuxFromScratch.

to sum up the new stuff in this book in a few words:

Hardware: x86 or ARM, with flash and JFFS2 and UBOOT
cross compile using gcc, uClibc, busybox, TinyLogin

The book feels like someone outlined everything and wrote one skin deep paragraph on everything.

I've been an embedded software engineer for years, but I haven't done all the different parts of a project. There's always someone else who does the bootloader, or writes a particular class of driver. When a coworker loaded my his copy of Building Embedded Linux Systems, I jumped at the chance to learn some of those areas where my experience did not reach. Within a few days I ordered my own copy and I'm in the middle of reading it. This book has just the right balance of high-level organization information with low-level, how to do it, details. Excellent book.