"Ronald G. Minnich" rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Spirit wrote:
That shouldn't be a problem unless it takes 5 seconds to get to the southbridge.c code. But of course, moving it to an earlier position is a good idea.
It really takes 5 seconds? it did not used to. I liked having it in the southbridge code for a simple reason: if you are in that code then things are working well. If you are not in that kind at some point, you really want that watchdog reset. It is a very simple self-test.
This is something I want to look at. I have seen the decompresser taking a full second on several different machines and I find any discernible pause to be a problem.
Tentatively I have attributed this to a poorly setup cache somewhere. But I have not had a chance to really investigate it.
As it stands right now I am in inch from moving the decompresser from code that runs from ROM to code that runs from RAM, to see if that fixes the performance issue.
When I load an etherboot image I have never detected a noticeable slowdown. Which is relevant because etherboot uses exactly the same code. With just minimal changes to cope with running the code in a different environment.
Eric