[PATCH 00/10] AXFS: Advanced XIP filesystem

[Jared Hulbert]

> I think the "fast" in "fast synchronous" gives it away :-)

Yes, I suppose it does.

> I'm using Spansion MirrorBit S29GL128N, which reads at about 0.6 MByte/s.

I think you should get more like an order of magnitude higher.... Get
an expert to look at your timings in the bootloader.  Make sure things
are cached too.  ioremap_cached()...

> Not because they're good, but because that's what the board I'm coding
> for has on it.  I presume they were cheap and familiar to the board
> designers.  (There is 32MB of RAM to play with after all.)
>
> So start a sequence of Busybox processes from a shell script is noticable,
> if it reads from NOR each time.
>
> Oh, and it's a 166MHz ARM, so it's quite capable of decompressing
> faster than the NOR can deliver.

Depends on how you are measuring it.   You ought to be able to get at
least 2 orders of magnitude higher read speeds with a good sync Flash.
 Some of the newer stuff is even faster.