dlload() a library from JDK's lib/ not knowing its full path

[Anthony Petrov]

Hello,

I'm currently working on MACOSX_PORT-176 (AWT Splashscreen support), and 
I need to be able to dlopen() the splash screen dynamic library from the 
native code. The library normally goes into the lib/ subdirectory of the 
jdk (or jre).

I've grep'ed macosx native code for other dlopen() calls and found out 
that we either load '0' (i.e. the current process itself), or use full 
path names to load a couple of common libs (notably, JavaRuntimeSupport 
and libGL.dylib).

Apparently, in the former case we simply assume that all the necessary 
libs have already been loaded from Java code with a System.loadLibrary() 
call or an equivalent. In the case of the splash screen we can't load 
the library from Java because the JVM isn't started yet - the splash 
screen initialization code is triggered from the Java launcher code.

Using dlopen("libsplashscreen.dylib"...) fails since the lib/ directory 
isn't in the search path for the dlopen() function.

Any suggestions on how to load the library? Could I somehow retrieve the 
executable's path (which must be <real_full_path_to_java>/bin/java or 
whatever other launcher is used) and calculate the full path for the 
library off it? Do I use argv[0] for that, or anything else specific to 
the Java launcher machinery (which I'm unfamiliar with, unfortunately)? 
Any other options?

--
best regards,
Anthony