On Jan 5, 2008 2:13 PM, Stefan Reinauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote: > > Check for a terminating LAR member which tells us that no further LAR > > member except the bootblock will be found after this member. > > The LAR member has a normal MAGIC, but all other parts of struct > > lar_header are 0xff. That way, adding a new member in place of the > > terminating member will not need an erase cycle. > > > I don't see a gain in this. Since we know the position and size of the > lar archive anyways, we know nothing will come after the bootblock.
OK, I'm back. Stefan, we don't really need this for correctness. But on the alix1c I am observing huge delays at startup while find_file iterates through 512KB of empty FLASH looking for entries that are not there. So the goal here is to have a header which says "I'm the last one" so we can short-circuit scanning all of flash. This one change will shave quite a few seconds from boot time. > There should not be any headers that do not belong to real "files" in > the lar, that would be breaking our model. The model is fine, it's just slow. This is a performance patch.None of us anticipated the slowness of walking FLASH looking for LAR headers. thanks ron -- linuxbios mailing list linuxbios@linuxbios.org http://www.linuxbios.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
