Basics of the Raspberry Pi operating system

In this section, you will learn how to use the Raspberry Pi to create an ARM assembly language program, assemble it into code that can be executed, and then run it on the Raspberry Pi. In the next chapter, we will look at the ARM architecture in greater depth.

We do not devote much time discussing RPi’s operating system because the world is full of websites devoted to Linux. We will cover the absolute minimum to help you use some of the commands that may be helpful. Most readers will use a graphical interface to perform editing, web searches, and running programs such as Python. We will introduce the basic concepts of Linux’s filing system and the command-line instruction necessary to assemble and run a source file written in the ARM assembly language. Unfortunately, the names of Unix/Linux commands are not intuitive.

Figure 9.4 illustrates the basic concepts of the Linux hierarchical operating system, with a node at each...