[OpenBIOS] [PATCH 0/8] RFC: OFMEM cleanup/memory reduction patch

Artyom Tarasenko atar4qemu at gmail.com
Tue Apr 10 20:53:40 CEST 2012


On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 8:43 PM, Tarl Neustaedter <tarl-b2 at tarl.net> wrote:
> On 2012-Apr-10 13:41 , Blue Swirl wrote:
>>
>> Yes, but again, image size savings are not very interesting. Savings
>> in image loading time is easily lost during decompression.
>>
>
> Why do you think image size saving aren't interesting? Certainly in the past
> couple of decades of Openboot development, we've several times been severely
> squeezed by prom sizes - in some cases, we had to rip out functionality to
> be able to fit in our PROM.

The problem is currently OpenBIOS won't work on a bare metal, since
it's tightly coupled with qemu. So, PROM size at this point is a
purely academical question.

> For what it's worth, Openboot currently compresses the "dropin" images
> (FCode standalone images for devices) before assembling them into the PROM
> image, and decompresses those when they are brought in with find-dropin.

So, basically, if OpenBIOS has to support FCode "dropin" images, it
must support the compression type (s?) used in OBP?

-- 
Regards,
Artyom Tarasenko

solaris/sparc under qemu blog: http://tyom.blogspot.com/search/label/qemu



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