[ACTIVITY] march 19 to april 14

[Nicolas Pitre]

March 19 to 23:

- Initial implementation of the in-kernel b.L switcher.

- Move to the arm-soc tree as a base for the b.L work as it conveniently 
  contains some needed setup bits specifically for the Cortex-A7.

- Tracking the v3.4-rc1 merge window.

- Modifications to ARM's generic boot wrapper to cope with an extended
  boot protocol regarding hotplug of any CPU and any cluster.

March 26 to 30:

- Review of the initial AArch64 patches.

- Attempt at LDRD/STRD optimized in-kernel memcpy/copy_user routines for 
  the Cortex-A15.  This is in reaction to a patch posted on the 
  linux-arm-kernel list which didn't look optimal from a readability
  point of view.

- Fixed the SDIO single IRQ optimization that produced spurious pending 
  IRQ notifications.

- More work on the b.L switcher, rebasing it to v3.4-rc1.

- Fixed the pl011 serial driverprobe code broken in mainline that 
  oopsed the kernel (as did many other people in parallel).

- Completion of basic b.L switcher support, running into cache coherency 
  problems causing spectacular kernel crashes.

April 02 to 06:

- Review of the semihosting and native DT support to the reference 
  switcher bootwrapper from Dave Martin.

- Looking for a better bootwrapper base to merge my non hacked-up boot 
  protocol changes.  I would like to also have the semihosting support, 
  but that is available only in specialized bootwrappers that I have no 
  use for.

- Posted progress on the b.L switcher, especially the cache coherency 
  issues, in case someone could give me a clue.

- Initial thinking about the b.L switcher instrumentation.

- Getting stuck with the b.L switcher and the cache corruption issue, so 
  I posted a code drop to the private list for people at ARM to 
  investigate.

- Self reviews and all.

- Yay! The b.L cache issue was due to a Fast Model bug.  With an updated 
  emulator, my switcher code just works!

April 09 to 13:

- Easter.

- Posted my patch to the generic bootwrapper to Will D. and got comments 
  back that I still need to address.

- Cleaned and refactored my b.L switcher code into separate commits.
  Broke it in the process (obviously).  Investigation and fix followed.

- Merged LCD support for the VE model from dmart's tree into my tree  to 
  help the Android guys.
  guys.

- Started to look at the cpufreq driver from Dave M. and at cpufreq 
  support in general.  Still confused by some aspects of the API.


Nicolas