International Business Machines Corporation

Lee Emison Hagy

Deepak Anantarao Kulkarni

Grama Kasturi Harish

James Darrell Heath

William F Quinn

Chakravarthy Jagannadhan

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 loader's address space when remapped into the loader by the kernel. At system start-up or &ldquo;boot,&rdquo; 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.

Method and system for loading libraries into embedded systems

A method and means for enhancing an embedded system includes means for and steps of executing a boot routine; activating a ROM loader routine; initializing an I/O subsystem; activating an embedded OS; creating a dynamically linked embedded system loader task, and having the embedded OS map the Global Coerced Memory (GCM) and the Global Shared Memory (GSM) into its address space so that it can access shared libraries; loading each of a plurality of executable programs, and mapping the GCM and the GSM into each executable program's address space so it is able to access shared libraries.

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Lee Emison Hagy