Syslinux - Jan 2005 - Slow performance booting USB device with 3.xx

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