Re: On understanding Re: Apple's Developer Transition Kit
> And, even though Macs are quite possibly the most visible use of PPC chips,
> the embedded market uses it, AFAIK. Understanding how the architecture
> works would be mostly welcome and a brand new kind of developers could be
> created to help you with smaller issues where you won't want to waste your
> time.
I do not have time to go that far, and I suppose there are already
plenty of papers & books describing the ppc architecture. This is out of
context of what I was talking about.
At the same time, I do not intend to do a long document detail all of
the intrinsics of the power mac hardware, that is beyond the scope, the
information for the most part is available in the form of the linux
source code, darwin bits, OF device-tree etc...
It would be more a paper giving an overview of the power mac
architecture, the various chipsets used by apple, where to find the code
in the kernel that deals with this or that bit, how to interpret the OF
device-tree bits, etc...
> IMO, that would be awesome.
>
> If you intend to write a long document, perhaps you could break it up into
> parts that you could send to IBM DeveloperWorks (perhaps with them creating
> a new column with this in mind) and when all the articles are finished,
> glue together the articles (if you need a monkey to do that, just let me
> know).
I do not have time to go that far.
> I don't know how much interested IBM would be in that. But it would sure be
> a good addition to anybody's resumé (like if you needed this, but), not to
> mention as an introduction for many people to work with lower level things
> (I have never worked with things in low level -- except when I was trying
> to understand how to write a C version for the linearblend deinterlacer for
> my xine running on my iBook).
A low level explanation of the PowerPC kernel might be something useful
but is beyond the scope here, really.
> BTW, I still would like to devote some time to see if I can come up with
> improvements to the point where xine would be able to play a DVD under
> Linux on my iBook without too many frames being dropped (it's been quite a
> while since I last played with that).
The best for that would be to be able to make use of the HW IDCT
acceleration in the ATI chip ...
Ben.
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