Intel sez: Synchronous Flash and XIP is the future -- thoughts?

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, David Woodhouse wrote:

> 
> nico at cam.org said:
> >  On ARM this has no value since the kernel takes up at most 1 or 2
> > page table  entries (1MB section descriptors that is).
> 
> But you could still start up quickly from flash without having to memcpy 
> the entire kernel into RAM first, then once you're running copy the kernel 
> text into RAM and alter the page tables so you're running from the RAM copy 
> instead of the flash.
> 
> This gives you the fast startup of XIP without the runtime pain of XIP. But 
> it's probably overkill.

Well at that point I prefer the penalty of about half a second with storing
a compressed kernel in flash and let it decompress to RAM directly.  Oh and
btw we've made the ARM kernel decompressor XIP from flash long time ago.


Nicolas