A child process is associated to both objects created by the child process and to a virtual table of pointers which designate the objects. The child process completes a communication path by creating an object and granting access to the object to the parent process by passing a pointer designating the object to the parent process. The parent process creates and loads the child process, then passes a pointer which designates the object to the child process. Communication is established by the parent process which creates, loads and unloads both a child process and an object that describes the functions that are accessed by the child process.

Additional circuitry stores information regarding where the system (S) failed during the diagnostic testing and retrieves such information for the user upon reset.Ī software system uses virtual functions to control communication between independent software modules configured in an architecture which includes a parent process and one or more independent child processes.

However, when the CPU (29) is not functioning properly, the hardware reset signal resets the CPU (29). When functioning properly, the CPU (29) prepares for the hardware reset signal that is produced by the reset circuitry (28) and avoids being reset by the hardware reset signal. The reset signal serves as an input to reset circuitry (28) which immediately transmits a nonmaskable interrupt (NMI) to the CPU (29) and, after a delay period, transmits a hardware reset signal to the CPU (29). Typically this time period relates to a diagnostic program being run. A real-time clock (RTC) (21), programmed by a central processing unit (CPU) (29) to run for a period of time, produces a reset signal after the period of time elapses. A watchdog timer circuit of the present invention monitors a computer system (S) during diagnostic testing and resets the system when it is nonfunctioning.

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