[LinuxBIOS] [PATCH] v3: add a check for a termination member

[Stefan Reinauer]

ron minnich wrote:
> On Jan 5, 2008 2:27 PM, Stefan Reinauer <stepan at coresystems.de> wrote:
>   
>> Many seconds, though just scanning for an 8 byte signature at a 16byte
>> aligned address?
>>     
>
> it's depressing, but yes. It's also surprising.
>
>   
>> That's a max of 32k string compares for every file that is _not_ found.
>> Otherwise the number of compares is as high as the number of files in
>> the lar minus 1. (ie. below 10)
>>     
>
> no, it walks all of flash. see lib/lar.c -- or it seems to, it takes so long.
>   

I can't find the behavior you describe in find_file(). It returns as 
soon as the file is found. Your delay must come from some other issue.

I suspect we are looking for files that are not there yet. Probably some 
normal/fallback stuff that our makefiles don't do yet, but stage1.c 
does. We should not look for fallback files if we don't compile any.

Or, we just add an "empty" lar with a correct header containing all of 
0xff, having a correct size etc. Then we don't use pseudo headers at 
least. But this would break our design idea to allow files with holes in 
them so this should really be the last resort.

Stefan



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