[U-Boot] [PATCH 03/12] da850: add NOR boot mode support

Netagunte, Nagabhushana nagabhushana.netagunte at ti.com
Wed Aug 17 14:43:28 CEST 2011


Hi Detlev,

Thanks for your valuable and detailed comments, they make sense. I will make appropriate changes and reduce the env size.

Best Regards,
-Nag

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 16:20:51, Detlev Zundel wrote:
> Hi Nag,
> 
> [...]
> 
> >> > +#define CONFIG_SYS_FLASH_SECT_SZ	(128 << 10) /* 128KB */
> >> > +#define CONFIG_ENV_OFFSET		(CONFIG_SYS_FLASH_SECT_SZ * 3)
> >> > +#define CONFIG_ENV_SIZE			(128 << 10)
> >> 
> >> Are you absolutely sure that you need 128 KiB of environment data?
> >> Keep in mind that such a big environment will _considerably_ slow 
> >> down booting - and in all practical situations I have seen so far the 
> >> actual environment size was in the order of a few KiB only - I don;t 
> >> even remember any board with more than 10 KiB.
> >> 
> >
> > I agree with you that 128 KiB is huge. It is 128KiB because sector 
> > size for NOR flash is 128KiB. So, decision was to reserve one complete 
> > sector for ENV Data.
> 
> It's pretty common to have such large sectors.  So using one sector for the environment is of course pretty common.  From the sector size however we use only a fraction for the _actual_ data, as the environment functions have a runtime dependency on the size of the environment _data_ (think about calculating the CRC).  So if you simply reduce the environment (data) size, you will get faster runtime practically for free.  So keep the flash layout but reduce the environment size.
> 
> Cheers
>   Detlev
> 
> --
> The GNU GPL makes sense in terms of its purpose: freedom and social solidarity.  Trying to understand it in terms of the goals and values of open source is like trying understand a CD drive's retractable drawer as a cupholder.  You can use it for that, but that is not what it was
> designed for.                      -- Richard Stallman
> --
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