International Business Machines Corporation

Other

James Michael Phelan

James W Arendt

Ravindranath Kasinath Manikundalam

David Howard Evans

Paul P Giangarra

Jonathan William Edwards

Donald Robert Padgett

John Walter Mehl

Jeffrey Kennedy Wheatley

A method and apparatus for debugging applications on a microkernel without invoking services provided by a particular personality. An application debugger is separated into three distinct pieces consisting of a user interface, debug engine, debug probe (instrumentation server). The user interface supports user inputs and debugger output in a language and platform-independent syntax. The debug engine supports semantics for specific language and target operating environments. The debug probe supports low-level query, access and update of the applications's state. The instrumentation server checks to see if a requested application is in its list of known application tasks. The instrumentation server sets an application into debug mode by either attaching to the application from a list of applications that it has constructed by polling the IBM Microkernel loaders or by having the application launched by a given IBM Microkernel loader. Because the instrumentation server has root authority, it is able to enquire and obtain the application's task control port and therefore manipulate the applications's state using standard microkernel system calls.

Method and apparatus for debugging applications on a personality neutral

A data processing system stores and maintains a plurality of security levels for dynamically linked libraries. Upon loading of an application, and upon determination of which dynamically linked libraries are required by the application, the data processing system determines the predefined security level assigned to the application and loads dynamically linked libraries previously encoded with the predefined security level.

User level control of degree of client-side processing

Lazy loading of executable library objects reduces operating system overhead and memory commitment requirements by postponing object loading until object references are expected. Initial task loading allocates only the main executable and library objects referenced by that executable. Secondary referenced objects are not allocated. Object references cause page faults for allocated but not loaded pages. Page fault handling causes loading and fixup of executable objects. Page fault handling also determines the next level of object references and allocates memory for the next object level. Shared memory systems allow sharing of executable objects until explicitly referenced. Once referenced, memory fault causes copying and fixup to referencing task memory area.

System and method for lazy loading of shared libraries

Growing community of inventors

Austin, TX, United States of America

James Michael Phelan