Embedded Software Engineer

☛ Prototype of the function used to create a child process is pid_t fork(void);

☛ Fork is the system call that is used to create a child process. It takes no arguments and returns a value of type pid_t.

☛ If the function succeeds it returns the pid of the child process created to its parent and child receives a zero value indicating its successful creation.

☛ On failure, a -1 will be returned in the parent's context, no child process will be created, and errno will be set.

☛ The child process normally performs all its operations in its parents context but each process independently of one nother and also inherits some of the important attributes from it such as UID, current directory, root directory and so on.

Input and output devices or functions allow the user to interact with the external files. Input and output functions are used to transfer the load on the bus. It uses the multiplexes having the input and output signals that remain same. Input and output buses move at the slower rate or speed than the processor speed. This increases the problem of bottleneck or the deadlock due to poor performance. There is a possibility to send more transistors for a layout to be given. These different devices may have very different speeds of communication. When programming IO bus control, make sure to take this into account.

In some systems, memory mapped IO is used. In this scheme, the hardware reads its IO from predefined memory addresses instead of over a special bus. This means you'll have simpler software, but it also means main memory will get more access requests.

The C's volatile keyword is a qualifier that tells the compiler not to optimize when applied to a variable. By declaring a variable volatile, we can tell the compiler that the value of the variable may change any moment from outside of the scope of the program. A variable should be declared volatile whenever its value could change unexpectedly and beyond the comprehension of the compiler.

In those cases it is required not to optimize the code, doing so may lead to erroneous result and load the variable every time it is used in the program. Volatile keyword is useful for memory-mapped peripheral registers, global variables modified by an interrupt service routine, global variables accessed by multiple tasks within a multi-threaded application.

The interrupts that comes in between the input/output operations gets detected when the input/output devices are ready. The interrupt never gets handled directly rather, it sends the interrupt signal to the thread to the input/output device that is ready to allow the thread to take necessary actions. The thread uses the signaling concept that allows the initialization to be done using the semaphore that keeps the states updated and handle the interrupt in an easy way. The input/output device getting the request and it also passes the semaphore to handle. The input/output device takes the semaphore that is ready. The thread is having the minimum latency that uses the first level interrupt handler to handle the interrupts completely. It allows the priority of the thread to be set and it doesn’t allow the context to be change as well.

The memory bus is used to carry the address and the data from the processor to the memory so that it can be easily accessed by the devices. These buses carry the value of the data that has to be passed for the proper functioning. The use of the technique “Time division multiplexing” is used that allow the reading and writing of the data to be done from the same bus line. This requires lots of time to be given to the bus so that it can complete the read and write operation of the data in the memory. This is very expensive process due to the data transfer technique that is used in between the processor and the memory. This also gives the concept of cache and provides algorithms to solve the problems occurring in read and writes operations.

DMA stands for Direct Memory Access controller that handles the allocation of the memory dynamically to the components and allows the data to be transferred between the devices. It is used for the communication between different input/output devices. It automatically detects the devices that are present for the transfer of data between the input/output devices. The interrupt can be used to complete the data transfer between the devices. It is used to give the high quality performance as, the input/output device can perform the operations that are in parallel with the code that are in execution phase. It can’t be used in all the systems. It consists of 8-bit microcontrollers that are used to control the overall system in execution.