Tickless/dyntick kernel, highres timer and general time crapectomy

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>]

Time to send bring this to a larger audience.

I'm working on getting dyntick and highres timer support working for MIPS.
This unavoidably implies dumping most of the MIPS-private time
infrastructure we've piled up over the past decade.  Which really is a
major crapectomy.  A first cut of the patches which are tested to run
well on uniprocessor and VSMP Malta kernels is at:

  ftp://ftp.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/people/ralf/dyntick-quilt

It will also likely work on various other simple systems.  A more recent
version of these patches which I haven't yet gotten around to test on
silicon is available at:

  ftp://ftp.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/people/ralf/linux-time.patches

The patchset is both large and intrusive.  One of the things that are still
missing is support for additional clocksources and clockevent_devices.
Particularly Alchemy (and any other system supporting clock scaling) will
need some work there since the cp0 count/compare timer are not useful on
such systems.  Help with those would be greatly appreciated.

  Ralf