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The ARM cross-compilers use .init_array to hold pointers to compiler-generated functions that run constructors for statically allocated C++ objects. Therefore .init_array is processed before calling lnk_prelude(). However, lnk_prelude() can't itself be called using the .init_array mechanism because it takes arguments, it returns a status value and there's no way to control the ordering of entries in .init_array. 

RTEMS shared object

The shared object containing RTEMS, newlib and other run-time support is unique in that it has to be loaded at a fixed location, the start of the RTS Region. The loading is done by U-Boot which looks at the physical addresses of the loadable segments in order to determine where to put them. In order to set the physical addresses properly the linker script for the RTEMS object assigns all output to a region of memory, defined using the MEMORY directive, whose physical and virtual addresses start at the required location. This has the side effect of giving the lowest loadable segment in the shared object a non-zero starting virtual address which has to be taken into account when using symbols defined by the object. All other shared objects are statically linked with virtual addresses starting at zero.