RFC eliminating zeroing of heap/workspace

[joel.sherrill at oarcorp.com (Joel Sherrill)]

Hi,

I have done some investigation on a simulator
and determined that much of the time required
to bring the minimum test from reset to the
first task is consumed by zero'ing the
C Program Heap and RTEMS Workspace.

My testing is on a simulated system which
has 4MB of RAM and zeroes all but maybe
64K of it since that is the code and data.
It takes 97% of the boot time to clear this
much RAM.

What's the general sentiment about clearing:

+ the C program heap
+ the RTEMS workspace

Just wanting opinions and thoughts.

--joel