[SeaBIOS] Running out of space in e/f-segments

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 12:33:24AM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> On 22.08.2010 19:02, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> > I'm not sure what you mean by "4G-2M" - are you suggesting running XIP
> > in the "flash" chip?  This is possible in qemu/kvm, but it's not
> > something you'd want to do on real hardware.  Accesses to the flash
> > chip are terribly slow - on real hardware you want to copy the code
> > from flash to ram as soon as possible.
> If you can switch on caching for the flash area and do it correctly, why
> would it be slow during POST?
> Of course you have to switch off caching of flash once you pass control
> to the bootloader, and then flash will be slow, but for initial POST it
> should work fine.
> > (You typically want to compress everything in flash also.)
> Of course that's indeed a compelling argument.

Caching flash would mitigate some of the slowness, but as you point
out, it has complexities and is still not really a great solution.
It's far simpler and more robust to copy the code to ram on real
hardware.  (In contrast, on qemu/kvm it's really quite simple to just
jump into the extra copy of SeaBIOS at 0xfffe0000.)

-Kevin