[LinuxBIOS] Speed up flash programming!

[Hamish Guthrie]

Hi,

Just a small note:

In order to speed up flash programming, I have a small note which may be
useful - when a flash device is erased, all bits are set to 0xff - when
programming the device, any bit which is not a 1 is changed to a 0,
therefore, it is advantageous for speed purposes to have any byte which does
not need to be programmed in the flash device set to 0xff. Currently,
objcopy sets all padding bytes to 0x00 which adds to the programming time
considerably. If you merely insert '--gap-fill 0xff' into all lines in
freebios2/src/config/Config.lb where OBJCOPY appears, the resultant binary
will have 0xff's as the fill character instead of 0x00's.

There are 2 ocurrences of this in the Config.lb file, and the lines should
read:

action "$(OBJCOPY) --gap-fill 0xff -O binary linuxbios linuxbios.strip"

and

action "$(OBJCOPY) --gap-fill 0xff -O binary $< $@"

respectively.

Regards

Hamish

[Ronald G. Minnich]

good one! thanks.

if you want, send me a patch and I can apply.

ron