* Eric W. Biederman ebiederm@xmission.com [110502 22:00]:
Sven Schnelle svens@stackframe.org writes:
Add an option to make compression of ramstage configurable. Right now it is always compressed. On my Thinkpad, the complete boot to grub takes 4s, with around 1s required for decompressing ramstage. This is probably caused by the fact the decompression does a lot of single byte/word/qword accesses, which are really slow on SPI buses. So give the user the option to store ramstage uncompressed, if he has enough memory.
Odd. Historically this has been solved by simply putting an mtrr over the compressed area. So that you would still get full cache block transfers during the decompression. I am fuzzy about the appropriate mode. Write protect I think.
Have you tried setting up an mtrr over the area that will be decompressed. That should result in something that is even faster than copying non-compressed data.
The problem is that the code hard coded those values assuming coreboot lives in the first 1MB which is not the case anymore since we have SMM handlers.
Stefan