[syslinux] Slow performance booting USB device with 3.xx

[kc8imd at comcast.net]

Andrea Mazzoleni wrote:
> With the new 3.01 and 3.07 version I found a big slowdown booting from
> USB devices.
> 
> On my PC it takes more than 2 minutes to load the kernel and the
> initrd filesystem. Compared with the previous behaviour of syslinux
> 2.13 with takes only 10 seconds or little more.

I also noticed what I think is a regression issue for all v3 and greater versions of SYSLINUX last week. The target system is a DELL, boot media is PQI USB drive. Partitioned as a ZIP disk and formatted FAT16 the best results are obtained, which loads the SYSLINUX boot splash (to DSL in this case) and then locks up completely. v2.13 works fine. 

I did not have time to mess around once I discovered that it was regression (wasn't expecting SYSLINUX to be the issue), but I will be playing with it a bit more after work tomorrow. Also I will get the model number of the PC and such.

I apologize if this has been posted before, but I just joined the list late Friday night to ask about this after lurking a few days.

Toby