[ Yeah OK... I'm really bad with this stuff. ]
January 23 to FEbruary 03
- More on-going study of the standalone b.L switcher code.
- Discussion with Le.chi Thu, Paul Larson and others about big.LITTLE switcher testing requirements.
- Involved in the review cycle for a patch about the new generic ioremap optimization from Pawel Moll which turned out to be bad and needed a subsequent revert.
- Obtaining and setting up the b.L Fast Model license.
- Review of some RCU changes pushed down the platform idle code path by Paul E. McKenney which I ended up NAKing.
- Review of a patch from Stephen Boyd to disable preemption when reading CCSIDR on ARMv7 to which I suggested a simpler alternative.
- Review of the initial test plan for the big.LITTLE switcher.
- REview of the SA11x0 cleanups from RMK.
- Investigation and prodding sent to Andrew Lunn for fixing a few Kirkwood breakages from recent consolidation changes.
- More design discussions around b.L switcher with people from ARM Ltd, notably Robin Randhawa.
- Preparing for Linaro Connect.
February 06 to 10
- Attending Linaro Connect.
- REview of Rob Herring's series cleaning up and removing IRQ and FIQ related macros from the kernel.
- Wrote an article about big.LITTLE switcher for LWN.
- REview of Marc Zyngier's series to add per SoC SMP and CPU hotplug operations.
- Quickstart session with Dave Martin to run the ARM Fast Model for b.L.
February 13 to 24
- Refinement to my LWN article about b.L before publication.
- Review of a patch series preparing the kernel for being entered in hypervisor mode by Dave Martin.
- Discussion (on IRC) between Dave Martin and myself about design changes brought to the in-kernel b.L switcher.
- Start experimenting with the b.L fast model.
- Read and digested various documents about the ARM virtualization, the GIC, etc.
- Produced some b.L project status to help project management transition from Usman to Mounir.
- Posted a patch to add support for early console output via semihosting.
- Wrote the first part of the big.LITTLE write-up for the monthly member report (Paul McKenney did the second part).
February 27 to March 02
- Away on vacation.
March 05 to 16
- Review of the initial Kirkwood conversion to FDT by jason@lakedaemon.net.
- Review of a patch series removing most instances of io.h by Rob Herring.
- Comments/suggestions on how to deal with unresponsive maintainers, prompted by Amit Kucheria.
- Review of a patch by Stephen Warren to generalize u-Boot's uImage wrapping in the kernel build.
- More experiments with the b.L software model, attempting to boot a 8-core SMP system, running into cross cluster cache coherency problems. Finally get it to boot, thanks to the ARM guys who provided the missing clue.
- Look at the multi-cluster aware boot protocol patches by Lorenzo Pieralisi. Some of it might be directly useful for the b.L switcher.
- Review of Dave Martin's patch series to facilitate custom opcode injection.
- Improved a patch I posted months ago to remove the debugging restrictions inside the devicemaps_init() function and pushed upstream. REcent changes to the kernel are making this patch very useful for people to debug their own kernel.
- Quick review of the Cortex-M3 support by Uwe Kleine-König.
- Moved to the arm-soc tree to implement the in-kernel switcher as it contains everything to boot a vexpress config with device tree on the software model.
Nicolas
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
- Integration of the b.L cpufreq driver from dmart with the in-kernel switcher.
- Discussion on the Linaro "members first" policies for code availability.
- Review and discussion with the ARM folks on the b.L power management requirements and integration with the b.L switcher.
- Linaro Connect flight booking.
- Posted my b.L GIC changes for review to the private list. Discussion and further changes ensued.
- Reviewed version 2 of the AArch64 patch series.
Note: I'll be absent from May 2nd to May 6th.
Nicolas
linaro-kernel@lists.linaro.org
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Nicolas Pitre