[patch 0/4] Altera Nios II port

[Sandra Loosemore]

I will be posting a 4-part series of patches with support for the Altera 
Nios II target.

part 1: code changes for Nios II target
part 2: target descriptions
part 3: gdbserver support
part 4: testsuite tweak

This port has a long history, and is being submitted as part of a joint 
project between Altera and Mentor Graphics.  The original port was 
produced by Altera for GDB 6.1 and supported the ELF (bare-metal) target 
only.  In 2008, CodeSourcery (now Mentor Graphics) updated the patches 
to GDB 6.6 and added support for Nios II GNU/Linux target, including 
gdbserver support.  But at that time the ELF target support became 
bit-rotten and parts of it were dropped.  More recently, we have updated 
the patches against current GDB and resurrected or reimplemented the ELF 
support.

I'm willing to be listed as target maintainer if somebody has to do it, 
but in truth quite a number of people at CodeSourcery and Mentor 
Graphics have contributed to this port.  Andrew Jenner implemented the 
GNU/Linux and gdbserver support, and Julian Brown and Chung-Lin Tang 
have helped with the recent cleanup and modernization effort.  Luis 
Machado and Yao Qi have also helped with advice and code review.

The binutils support for this target has already been accepted into FSF 
trunk.  The GCC and Newlib patches have been posted but are not yet 
approved or committed.  The GLIBC port still needs more work but we are 
planning to submit that as well.

We tested these patches on hardware for both the GNU/Linux and ELF 
targets, not with a simulator.  For ELF testing we used a custom stub 
driving an Altera USB Blaster probe, and for GNU/Linux target we used 
the included gdbserver.

-Sandra