D r a f t Prelink Jakub Jelı́nek Red Hat, Inc. jakub@redhat.com March 4, 2004 Abstract Prelink is a tool designed to speed up dynamic linking of ELF programs on various Linux architectures. It speeds up start up of OpenOffice.org 1.1 by 1.8s from 5.5s on 651MHz Pentium III. 1 Preface In 1995, Linux changed its binary format from a.out to ELF. The a.out binary format was very inflexible and shared