Partial Build and Flashing

Generally, software engineers and developers spend a lot of time to compile a project and flash the binary files to the corresponding board during the big automotive software projects. This process may lead to consuming large amount of time, and this time increases as the project grows. In a compilation process, we encounter few mechanisms like a preprocessor, a compiler, an assembler and finally a linker. E very mechanism has its own role, and any reduction in time that any of these mechanisms spent, has a positive impact on whole build process. An automotive software project consists of different layers, and these layers include different components. (AUTOSAR Model / Layered Architecture) [1] Every component and layer are linked each other via symbols, like external function calls, external data definitions etc. In this article, it is suggested an approach for optimizing build process by reducing linking time. The approach is based on creating predefined m emory sections i n s ource fi le le vel. With this every symbol is going to have a fixed memory address, so every time a source file i s u pdated, j ust t he updated s ource file is going to be compiled and the linking to the symbols that the source file contains, would not be necessary. This study showed that, software development could be achieved considerably less efforts and time by the optimizing the build process.