This patch replaces the former prominent use of pointers by references
wherever feasible. This has the following benefits:
* The contract between caller and callee becomes more obvious. When
passing a reference, the contract says that the argument cannot be
a null pointer. The caller is responsible to ensure that. Therefore,
the use of reference eliminates the need to add defensive null-pointer
checks at the callee site, which sometimes merely exist to be on the
safe side. The bottom line is that the code becomes easier to follow.
* Reference members must be initialized via an object initializer,
which promotes a programming style that avoids intermediate object-
construction states. Within core, there are still a few pointers
as member variables left though. E.g., caused by the late association
of 'Platform_thread' objects with their 'Platform_pd' objects.
* If no pointers are present as member variables, we don't need to
manually provide declarations of a private copy constructor and
an assignment operator to avoid -Weffc++ errors "class ... has
pointer data members [-Werror=effc++]".
This patch also changes a few system bindings on NOVA and Fiasco.OC,
e.g., the return value of the global 'cap_map' accessor has become a
reference. Hence, the patch touches a few places outside of core.
Fixes#3135
Instead of returning pointers to locked objects via a lookup function,
the new object pool implementation restricts object access to
functors resp. lambda expressions that are applied to the objects
within the pool itself.
Fix#884Fix#1658
For most platforms except of NOVA a distinction between pager entrypoint
and pager activation is not needed, and only exists due to historical
reasons. Moreover, the pager thread's execution path is almost identical
between most platforms excluding NOVA, HW, and Fisco.OC. Therefore,
this commit unifies the pager loop for the other platforms, and removes
the pager activation class.
