Maybe you are correct - it is hard to fill a page (get 18 entries) during the normal usage scenario - when not adding a lot of slightly different versions of payload for debug purposes... However, at least one person except me (Gerd Hoffmann) thought its a nice feature to have, so I decided to spend some time to implement and test it. If all the devices fit at 1 page - there will be no changes at user interface, no paging enabled. This paging enables by itself only when more than 18 entries are detected - only when it is necessary, all the other time this code is inactive
If I remember correctly, applying this whole patch (with paging included) increases seabios rom size just by ~250 bytes, removing the paging wouldn't give any noticeable benefit in size. So personally I don't see any downsides and will continue using this patch at its' current version ;)
2017-07-12 2:16 GMT+03:00 Ivan Ivanov qmastery16@gmail.com:
Maybe you are correct - it is hard to fill a page (get 18 entries) during the normal usage scenario - when not adding a lot of slightly different versions of payload for debug purposes... However, at least one person except me (Gerd Hoffmann) thought its a nice feature to have, so I decided to spend some time to implement and test it. If all the devices fit at 1 page - there will be no changes at user interface, no paging enabled. This paging enables by itself only when more than 18 entries are detected - only when it is necessary, all the other time this code is inactive
If I remember correctly, applying this whole patch (with paging included) increases seabios rom size just by ~250 bytes, removing the paging wouldn't give any noticeable benefit in size. So personally I don't see any downsides and will continue using this patch at its' current version ;)
2017-07-07 17:51 GMT+03:00 Kevin O'Connor kevin@koconnor.net:
On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 12:38:00AM +0300, Ivan Ivanov wrote:
Recently I discovered another area where this "35 devices" patch is useful. When you need to debug a payload on the real coreboot-supported hardware, to speed up the development you could include a lot of slightly different versions of the same payload to your coreboot ROM, and then could test them all after a single flashing, saving your time and reducing the wearing out of SPI flash
Sorry for the delay in responding.
I think it would be useful to support more than 10 devices in the boot menu. I'm not convinced we need a paging menu though. I suspect that increasing the count to 20 (or whatever fits on a page) should be sufficient for now.
-Kevin