> What exactly does the Java engine need to know?  All of this is going
> to be very different on systems that use Elf, e.g. the Alpha.

Basically, because it needs to wrap a bunch of syscalls to handle
async IO, it wants to get a handle for libc.so and then get the
address of read,write etc in that shared object.

I think that one could be achieved by just using dlsym(0,...).

More interesting is finding the path to libjava.so, so that the value
of JAVA_HOME can be determined (if the VM was not started using a full
path).  JAVA_HOME is used to set a reasonable default classpath.

Perhaps a more specific call like

const char *dlpath(void *handle, char *symbol)

that just returned the pathname of the underlying file or NULL.

--sjg