• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.183-192
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• 2001

In a development environment for embedded system with a connection between host and target system, the linker of host system links the cross-compiled object file and modules of target system and downloads the linked object file to the target system. In this research, we separate this linker into the module dependent on object file format and the module independent on object file format. The dependent module gets the linking information independent on file format from the object file, and the independent module actually does the linking process with this linking information_ This separation can improve the portability of development environment for a target system_ Also, our linker does the incremental remote linking that applies relocation not only to the obj ect file to be loaded but also to target's modules to have been loaded_ This incremental remote linking can reduce a linking time than linking by the united modules because of linking by module. The result of measuring linking time for SPEC95 integer benchmarks shows an average of reduction rates of 64.90%. Also, incremental remote linking can improve the comfortability of users who develop programs because users do not consider a downloading order of linking object files. Currently, we developed this linker in the embedded application development environment ESTO [1] to be prepared for a commercial product.