ARM training fixes

There have been some recent fixes to the ARM course pages. Here’s a summary with (reporter in brackets):

• Introduction to ARM > Movement
  • MVN ought to be described as “move NOT” rather than “move negated”. (Dan Lewis)
• Introduction to ARM > Conditional Execution
  • The entry for the “LE” condition code showed the wrong binary encoding. Also, the flags were getting mangled due to Markdown coopting the | character. (Michael Vartan)
  • In the “set the flags, then use various condition codes” example, the less-than comparison ought to have been less-than-or-equal. (Justin Davinroy)
• Efficient C for ARM > Sentinels
  • The “replacing array indexing with pointers” link was broken. (Marek Niepiekło)
• Fixed broken links on Efficient C for ARM > Pointer Aliasing, Efficient C for ARM > Function Argument Types and both index pages.

Survey of ARM cores used in iOS devices

I recently needed a complete list of ARM cores used in Apple’s iOS kit. We were trying to track down a bug which initially appeared to be something processor-dependent. The bug turned out to be something else, but I’d already compiled much of this table anyway. So, here it is for your reference:

The 64-bit A7 chips are still a bit too new to find out about in much detail.

See that the ‘S5L’ code name digits are the ‘APL’ product name but with its digits reversed. So a hypothetical Apple APL5678 would be a S5L8765.

Data from Wikipedia and PDAdb. E&OE.

And what do you know… I compile all that then I find this.

DaveSpace rebuilt

I’ve rebuilt DaveSpace because the old version was a bit of a bitch to maintain. Old DaveSpace was built with hsc, an old and unmaintained (but highly flexible and capable) tool for HTML preprocessing. Essentially the pages were HTML fragments with custom tags which were then wrapped in layers of macros dependent upon which section of the site they were in. The custom HTML formatting made it harder than necessary to maintain.

Gerph now may well be the last person using hsc. Fair game to the man. He is hardcore.

Initially I’d dabbled with Octopress which wasn’t quite flexible enough and then made a more serious stab with DocPad which looked very promising for a while, but ended up being incredibly frustrating and slow.

So I’ve rebuilt davepace.co.uk using gostatic which is a static site generator built in Go. It lets me write pages using Markdown syntax and it is fast.

The changeover involved converting all of the pages entries into Markdown format. I also wrote a script to enable custom additions into Markdown in order to make the ‘slide’ sections in the ARM training course work.

Other changes include:

• An RSS feed!
• New stylesheet
• New blog pages
• New ARM syntax highlighting (I really ought to write a proper one for Pygments)
• Removed the Google Adsense advertising

ARM training updates

• Added some mini reviews of the books pointed to by the books page.

New article: Re-casing an Iyonix

Added an article about putting an Iyonix in a new case.