I mentioned in the toolchain standup call that I'd done a quick
estimate of the work required to support vexpress, so I thought I
might as well clean it up a little and post it.

This is a quick summary and time estimate for adding Versatile
Express support to qemu. The general idea is that most of the
components on this board already have QEMU implementations
(since they're standard ARM primecells used in versatile/realview),
and we can live without the few major components that aren't
implemented (maybe we'd need dummy implementations if the
kernel prods them on startup.)

Components already supported by QEMU:
-------------------------------------
A9MPx4
PL050 keyboard, mouse
SMCS LAN9118 ethernet
PL011 UARTs
SP804 timers

Components with a near match in QEMU:
-------------------------------------
PL111 CLCD -- qemu has a PL110
PL180 MMC card -- qemu has a PL181
 -- both cases should either just work or be fairly trivial tweaks

Components not supported by QEMU:
---------------------------------
PL041 audio
compact flash
two-wire serial bus (for PCI-express switch config and DVI-I displays)
ISP1761 Philips USB controller
User switches and LEDs -- vexpress specific, but trivial to do

Components where a dummy implementation should be sufficient:
-------------------------------------------------------------

PL310 L2 cache controller
PL341 dynamic memory controller
PL354 static memory bus controller
trustzone controllers

Other required work:
--------------------
The usual knitting for interrupts, clocks, reset etc etc.

Summary
-------

Assuming we're happy not to worry about support for
audio, USB, two-wire serial bus or compact flash, this
is about two weeks work to put together, test and get
a more-or-less upstreamable patchset from. This would
produce a platform hopefully at least as usable as
versatile, but with an A9 and 1GB RAM.

-- PMM

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