ARM NPTL support for uClibc

[Jim Blandy]

Hi, folks.  Building on Steve Hill's work, CodeSourcery has put
together a uClibc NPTL port for the ARM processor we'd like to
contribute.  Our patch is relative to today's uClibc trunk.  This work
was done for MontaVista.

We've tested it configured for EABI ARM with no threads, using
linuxthreads.old, and using NPTL (libpthread/linuxthreads doesn't
support ARM), with no regressions.  There is one test suite regression
relative to the GNU C library, which hopefully I'll get fixed very
shortly.  I've included more detailed results below.

It's a very large patch --- 3MB including the new trees, or 633kB with
the new directories omitted (libpthread/nptl, libpthread/nptl_db,
test/nptl, and test/tls).  There are changes throughout the uClibc
tree.  The patch is available at the following URL:

    http://www.codesourcery.com/public/uClibc-0.9.28-csl-nptl-4.patch.gz

The patch is relative to revision 15785 of the public uClibc trunk.
You can retrieve this base tree from the public uClibc repository with
the following command:

    $ svn checkout -r 15785 svn://uclibc.org/trunk/uClibc

With much respect and appreciation for Steve Hill's work, we'd like to
suggest that these changes, once reviewed and revised, be included
directly on the uClibc trunk, rather than going through Steve's branch
and being merged to the trunk in December, as he suggested on Tuesday.
This is an opportunity for uClibc to benefit from Steve's and
CodeSourcery's efforts immediately, and support NPTL today, on one of
the most popular embedded processors.  Maintaining this patch
off-trunk through December would be a substantial burden for
CodeSourcery; patches of this scale bitrot quickly.