the following patch was just integrated into master: commit 3dea35e5a1a69c600feb2c16eef5d957b85c46ee Author: Aaron Durbin adurbin@chromium.org Date: Tue Feb 25 20:36:56 2014 -0600
x86: add MIRROR_PAYLOAD_TO_RAM_BEFORE_LOADING option
Boot speeds can be sped up by mirroring the payload into main memory before doing the actual loading. Systems that would benefit from this are typically Intel ones whose SPI are memory mapped. Without the SPI being cached all accesses to the payload in SPI while being loaded result in uncacheable accesses. Instead take advantage of the on-board SPI controller which has an internal cache and prefetcher by copying 64-byte cachelines using 32-bit word copies.
Change-Id: I4aac856b1b5130fa2d68a6c45a96cfeead472a52 Signed-off-by: Aaron Durbin adurbin@chromium.org
See http://review.coreboot.org/5305 for details.
-gerrit