[coreboot] Long boot delay with a large CBFS

[Ben Gardner]

Hi Patrick,

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 12:54 PM, Patrick Georgi <pgeorgi at google.com> wrote:
> 2015-11-16 19:32 GMT+01:00 Ben Gardner <gardner.ben at gmail.com>:
>> What is the purpose behind continuing if a bad entry is encountered?
>> It appears that a 'bad' entry only occurs at the end of the CBFS.
> With a properly chained CBFS, there are no such entries (except one at
> the end, maybe), and large empty regions are simply skipped because
> there's an empty file entry.
>
> Since we're in firmware with few recovery options, we don't want the
> computer to die with a black screen if all that happened may be some
> minor corruption in a data structure, and so we do a best-effort
> recovery by trying to find a new entry point into the chain. The
> theory being that it can't get worse.

That makes sense.

I must have had some corruption in the ROM image.
I rebuilt with CONFIG_CBFS_SIZE=0x00EC0000 again and I'm not seeing
the long pause.
I think I was playing with the 'fast boot' option at the time (now disabled).
I'll retry with that enabled.

Thanks,
Ben