Loading Actors

Actors may be loaded in two different ways: either at system boot time or dynamically.

The ChorusOS operating system is started from a bootable file, called the system image, which is loaded in memory either by a hardware boot or a primary boot, depending on the hardware. This bootable file contains the image of the system to be run on the target machine.

Boot Actors

The ChorusOS operating system environment provides tools to configure this system image with user provided actors, which may be user or supervisor actors. Once the system has performed its own initialization, it starts these actors automatically, creating a main thread in each of them. These actors are often referred to as boot actors.

Loading Actors Dynamically

In order to be able to dynamically load an application on a ChorusOS operating system, the system must have been configured with the ACTOR_EXTENDED_MNGT feature. In this type of configuration, the ChorusOS operating system is able to dynamically load binary files from the host system acting as an NFS server, from a local disk, or from the system image (/image/sys_bank). This host-target environment enables the user to load supervisor and user actors using a simple remote shell mechanism. To execute an application called hello on the target host moon, use the arun command, as follows:

% rsh moon arun hello

The ChorusOS operating system uses the .r suffix to denote relocatable binary files.

A relocatable actor is executed as follows:

% rsh moon arun mySupAppl.r

In this example, the .r suffix could be omitted, because the ChorusOS operating system looks first for the name as specified, mySupAppl, and then, if it does not find a file of that name, automatically looks for a file of that name with the suffix .r, mySupAppl.r.