On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 12:03 AM, Nicolas Pitre nicolas.pitre@linaro.org wrote:

I'm delighted to announce that the Linaro Technical Steering Committee has approved the release of the big.LITTLE in-kernel switcher (IKS) code to the public.

Good stuff Nico.

So here it is:

Branch big.LITTLE-IKS-snapshot of git://git.linaro.org/landing-teams/working/arm/kernel.git

Although this is a snapshot of our latest IKS code, it still needs some minor tidying before it is submitted upstream. So please consider the above as a temporary branch for people to look and play with, and not a branch that we'll keep stable and maintain.

As we rebase this code base onto 3.10-rcX and start upstreaming, can we make IKS a topic branch to be added to the LLCT tree? That way Andrey (cc'ed) could pull this in for 13.05 and you won't have to maintain two separate IKS+MP branches.

To be perfectly clear, LLCT's 'linux-linaro' branch would then contain IKS + ARM's reference MP patchset. Viresh and Vincent would then create another tree that would take linux-linaro, revert the reference MP patchset and apply the upstream-friendly version of the MP patchset.

This code was also developed for and tested on the VExpress TC2 development platform. An MCPM backend and possibly a special cpufreq clock driver are required for this code to be usable on other platforms.

The switcher concept is discussed here: http://lwn.net/Articles/481055/

Porting documentation is available here: https://wiki.linaro.org/projects/big.LITTLE.MP/Big.Little.Switcher/Docs/port...

The switcher code description is available here (slightly out of date): https://wiki.linaro.org/projects/big.LITTLE.MP/Big.Little.Switcher/Docs/in-k...

And a review of the MCPM layer upon which IKS and HMP rely: http://lwn.net/Articles/539082/

The core MCPM patches are queued for inclusion into the v3.10 mainline kernel. The MCPM backend for TC2 and the IKS patches will tentatively be submitted for v3.11.

Nicolas