Inventors:
Lee Emison Hagy - Austin TX
Grama Kasturi Harish - Cedar Park TX
James Darrell Heath - Austin TX
Chakravarthy Jagannadhan - Santa Clara CA
Deepak Anantarao Kulkarni - Austin TX
Assignee:
International Business Machines Corporation - Armonk NY
International Classification:
G06F 9445
Abstract:
A method and means for enhancing an embedded system includes a technique for generating shared library information which is stored in the ROM, the shared library information including pointers to structures for each shared library to be preloaded into the ROM, maintaining each module per library as a linked list. When the ROM image is generated, the tool writes the structures describing the preloaded libraries into the ROM image. As pointers to the structures are not valid in the ROM image, the pointers to these modules are relocated so that they are valid in the loaders address space when remapped into the loader by the kernel. At system start-up or âboot,â the kernel starts the embedded loader and maps the structures exactly where the loader expects to find them. Thus, when the loader attempts to load an external dynamically linked ELF executable file that is linked to one of the shared libraries in the ROM, the loader resolves all references to the preloaded library by traversing the structures provided that were mapped into its address space by the system kernel.