Once I got the new netboot system working, I tested and landed the NEON part of my tiling work (the big 208% download and 41% upload performance improvements). I'm looking forward to fixing up the clever tiling math parts soon.
I also tested and landed a few little compiler improvements. The nicest compiler improvement was turning on a switch that Marek added to gallium: We now run the GLSL compiler optimization loop exactly once (because it's required to avoid GLSL linker regressions), and rely on NIR to do the actual optimization after the GLSL linker has run. The GLSL IR is a terrible IR for doing optimization on (only a bit better than Mesa or TGSI IRs), and it's made worse by the fact that I wrote a bunch of its optimizations back before we had good datastructures available in Mesa and before we had big enough shaders that using good datastructures mattered. I'm horrified by my old code and can't wait to get it deleted (Timothy Arceri has been making progress on that front). Until we can actually delete it, though, cutting down the number of times we execute my old optimization passes should improve our compile times on complicated shaders.
Now that I have a good way to test the downstream kernel, I went ahead and made a giant backport of our current vc4 kernel code to the 4.9 branch. I hope the Foundation can get that branch shipped soon -- backporting to 4.9 is so much easier for me than old 4.4, and the structure of the downstream DT files makes it much clearer what there is left to be moved upstream.
Meanwhile, Michael Zoran has continued hacking on the staging VCHI code, and kernel reviewers were getting bothered by edits to code with no callers. Michael decided to solve that by submitting the old HDMI audio driver that feeds through the closed source firmware (I'm hoping we can delete this soon once Boris's work lands, though), and I pulled the V4L2 camera driver out of rpi-4.9.y and submitted that to staging as well. I unfortunately don't have the camera driver quite working yet, because when I modprobe it the network goes down. There are a ton of variables that have changed since the last time I ran the camera (upstream vs downstream, 4.10 vs 4.4, pi3 vs pi2), so it's going to take a bit of debugging before I have it working again.
Other news: kraxel from RH has resubmitted the SDHOST driver upstream, so maybe we can have wifi by default soon. Baruch Siach has submitted some fixes that I suspect get BT working. I've also passed libepoxy off to Emmanuele Bassi (long time GNOME developer) who has fixed it up to be buildable and usable on Linux again and converted it to the Meson build system, which appears to be really promising.