Salt Lake City, UT — (press release excerpt) — SnapGear Inc. today announced the addition of shared library support for the uClinux kernel. Shared library support yields significant memory advantages for embedded developers by allowing applications to share common code libraries rather than individually static linking them in.

Although specifically intended for Motorola ColdFire microprocessors the methods used can carry over to other 68k based processors easily with only minor considerations. This work will also generalise to other processor families with little effort.

In order to enable shared library support, a number of optimizations were made over previous tool chain releases which have had the effect of reduction in system memory size requirements coupled with performance improvements. The shared libraries themselves are flat files and indistinguishable from normal executables. No additional relocation and run time linking information needs to be supplied. Most importantly, no symbol table wastage appears on the embedded platform, this overhead is carried by the host system.

Detailed technical information and download instructions on the shared library support is available here

 
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