[LinuxBIOS] [PATCH] v3: add a check for a termination member

[Stefan Reinauer]

ron minnich wrote:
> On Jan 5, 2008 2:13 PM, Stefan Reinauer <stepan at coresystems.de> wrote:
>
>   
>> I don't see a gain in this. Since we know the position and size of the
>> lar archive anyways, we know nothing will come after the bootblock.
>>
>> There should not be any headers that do not belong to real "files" in
>> the lar, that would be breaking our model.
>>     
>
> the issue is that, before cache is enabled, we lose many, many seconds
> as the lar code scans all of flash. So we need an 'end of headers'
> entry. We need to know when to stop scanning.
>   
Many seconds, though just scanning for an 8 byte signature at a 16byte 
aligned address?

That's a max of 32k string compares for every file that is _not_ found. 
Otherwise the number of compares is as high as the number of files in 
the lar minus 1. (ie. below 10)

We should fix linuxbios, so we do not look for files that are not there. 
rather than invent broken pseudo files.

This is stuff that people will look at in 1-2 years and not understand 
why it went in, and someone is going to say "I don't remember but there 
was a nasty reason why we did it. We better keep it."


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