[U-Boot] incremental environment updating

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Mike,

In message <200904130609.08060.vapier at gentoo.org> you wrote:
>
> currently the env code will erase the entire env storage before writing back 
> out the current env, even if the env storage has enough empty space to store 
> the current env.  for example, if CONFIG_ENV_SIZE is declared as 0x2000 but 
> the current env only takes up ~0x300 bytes, the whole 0x2000 is erased and
> then the ~0x300 gets written out.  seems like we can get a pretty good return 
> for fairly low effort if we appended env updates rather than erasing/writing 
> every time ?  it'd certainly be faster.  while systems with a dedicated sector 
> this isnt so bad, but for people who have to embed the env in the middle of a 
> large sector, this would be much faster most of the time.
>
> has there been previous discussion along these lines that i havent seen ?

This hasn't been discussed before. Interesting idea. However, I fail
to see how this could be implemented without changing the environment
format?

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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