FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SNAPGEAR ANNOUNCES SHARED LIBRARY SUPPORT FOR UCLINUX

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah - April 10, 2002 - SnapGear Inc, a leading supplier of
consumer VPN Router appliances and OEM custom design solutions has
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.

SnapGear Inc. engineers have previously added other important improvements
to uClinux such as advanced memory management and eXecute In Place (XIP)
technology. Shared library support was developed as an extension to the
existing XIP code model to allow libraries to be shared amongst multiple
applications. This greatly reduces the size of those executables in the
file system. This in turn reduces the final image size. The overheads
required to support these shared libraries are minimal and the
modifications are relatively clean.

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.

Senior Software Engineer, Paul Dale, said: "There are some limitations,
none of which are severe. There is a limit of 8192 globals and distinct
procedures names for each library and each application separately although
in practice we've never needed even a quarter of these entries and that was
before shared libraries. There is also a limit on the actual number of
shared libraries but it's quite high. Lastly there is a code size
limitation of 16Mb per library/application - but in the context of embedded
MMUless microprocessors this is not at all a problem."

For detailed technical information and download instruction on the shared
library support please visit http://www.snapgear.com/tb20020409.html

About uClinux

uClinux is a set of patches under the GPL (GNU Public License) to standard
Linux which allows the Linux API to be used for microprocessors that lack
an MMU (Memory Management Unit). Further information can be obtained from
http://www.snapgear.com/uclinux.html

About SnapGear, Inc.

SnapGear Inc produce the popular SnapGear VPN Routers along with SecureEdge
custom design solutions. SnapGear Inc has produced turnkey development,
design, manufacturing and fulfillment services for multi-national
telecommunications companies. SnapGear solutions are characterised by
affordability, tight integration, and design ingenuity. Recent examples
include a sport/racing control terminal, an advanced VPN gateway router,
and a USB/PCMCIA platform for wireless and peripheral connection.

For more information on SnapGear please visit http://www.snapgear.com.

For more information on SecureEdge reference designs, development platforms
and services please visit http://www.secureedge.net

SnapGear and SecureEdge are registered trademarks of SnapGear Inc. Linux is
a registered trademark owned by Linus Torvalds. All other products,
services, companies and publications are trademarks or registered
trademarks of their respective owners.

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Press only, contact:
SnapGear
Miles Gillham
E-mail: press@snapgear.com