[syslinux] Patch sensible callback framework

[Steffen Winterfeldt]

On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> On 04/28/2010 02:30 AM, Steffen Winterfeldt wrote:
>> On Tue, 27 Apr 2010, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>
>>> d) I suspect we need to pass a few options to the callback.  In particular,
>>> we should have a user argument (typically a void *) which is passed in at
>>> register_callback() time, and probably information from the invocation point,
>>> e.g. the file descriptor/file pointer.
>>
>> Would it be possible to make the chunk size configurable? At least the 1MB
>> used in code is way too big.
>>
>
> I'm not sure it is.  I'm moving to a 1 MB chunk size in Syslinux 4,
> because with modern systems, the 64K chunk size used in Syslinux 3 is
> just way too small for decent performance.
>
> People care more about boot time than they used to (and I'm starting to
> get more and more people looking at Syslinux "because it's faster than
> Grub/Grub2"), and quite frankly it's a heck of a lot more important to
> boot quicker than to show exactly how much time it's left to load.
>
> The 64K number made sense for physical floppies, but that's ancient history.

Well, yes and no. If you think about disks and maybe even ssds that's
probably true. I was thinking more along pxe and dvd.

The other issue with 1MB chunks is that with about 10MB kernel+initrd this
would give only about 10 steps.


Steffen

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