[OLPC-devel] Flash driver status.

[Ronald G Minnich]

Jim Gettys wrote:
> How big are the vsa modules (each?)
> 
> We will be punting VESA emulation ASAP (and moving to a fbdev native
> driver).
>                             Regards,


that's fine, but we need 128k or so of flash for vsa. I can get 
linuxbios down to < 32k, I think, and I can get linux kernel down to < 
450K, but that VSA (not VESA, VSA) just kills us. And, AMD tells me that 
dumping VSA completely is very, very hard.

I may see if I can make vesa compress ... hmm. why did I not try this. DUH!

[rminnich at q GX2]$ ls -l vsa_test.bin*
-rw-rw-r--  1 rminnich rminnich 131072 Apr 25 14:24 vsa_test.bin
-rw-rw-r--  1 rminnich rminnich  35687 May 16 16:17 vsa_test.bin.nrv

and, linuxbios knows how to decode this compression. I can compress 
vmlinux and vsa with same compressor, so we only need one decompressor, 
which also saves space.

So ... < 64K for vsa+linuxbios, I think we can get the kernel in flash. 
512KB may work out. I'll start looking at this tonight.

ron