In the recent years, Linux, a public domain, freely available Unix variant has attracted the people very much. Today’s complex production environments demands superior application performance. Linux is having extraordinary advantages such as : complete source code access, availability of exceptional optimization, testing tools. This book is to explore this facet of Linux.

Features

• Explained Linux success stories with emphasis on facilities and tools available in Linux for SW development


• Explains gcc (GNU) toolchain in detail, combining C and C++, C and Java, and C and Fortran in a lucid manner


• How command line arguments can be handled by C/C++ programs with getopt, argp library are dealt


• Discusses about environment variables and their management


• System limits are explored with their implication of program performance


• Explains about how assembly programming can be done under Linux


• How to mix C and assembly, how system calls can be called from assembly, how modules can be developed in assembly and a bare boot (OS) program creation, are discussed in detail.


• How static and dynamic libraries are developed and commissioned in Linux is explained and how Libtool can be used for library development is discussed


• Dealt with Lex/Yacc tools, which are to be used in compiler development


• Memory management, memory errors, Linux memory management, etc., are described with illustrative examples


• A popularly used tool for detecting memory errors, Electric Fence, is explained with concept oriented examples


• A chapter on Valgrind explained as to how memory can be checked for memory leaks, segment violations, analyze the cache performance in an illustrative manner


• Describes memory mapping of files, especially for large files and the impact on program’s performance.


• Gnu debugger (gdb) is detailed; gcov and gprof explains about profiling of a C program to improve its performance; make, rcs, SW tools explains how they can be used for SW development in practice.with concept oriented examples with special reference to Web enabled applications.