Re:ARM Releases Machine Readable Architecture Specification
by adreid on Friday April 21, 2017 @03:27AM
(#14163695)
I've been working on making the specs be more than just a way of killing trees since April/May 2011. So I have had time to do a few things with it.
I would say I have a love-hate relationship with XML - your feelings seem to be less ambivalent.
One good thing about XML is that you can convert it to HTML.
Have a look at ISA_v82A_A64_xml_00bet3.1/xhtml/index.html (in the AArch64 tarball) - I find this to be the easiest way to navigate the ARM specs because I can follow hyperlinks inside the ASL code that take me to the function definitions. And keep going until I have read everything about what the ADD instruction does. Then I switch to the LDR instruction and I can chase down memory accesses and see code to handle big-endian configurations, unaligned accesses, page table walks, page fault handling, etc.
Once you have used this, you will not go back to PDF.
I would say I have a love-hate relationship with XML - your feelings seem to be less ambivalent. One good thing about XML is that you can convert it to HTML. Have a look at ISA_v82A_A64_xml_00bet3.1/xhtml/index.html (in the AArch64 tarball) - I find this to be the easiest way to navigate the ARM specs because I can follow hyperlinks inside the ASL code that take me to the function definitions. And keep going until I have read everything about what the ADD instruction does. Then I switch to the LDR instruction and I can chase down memory accesses and see code to handle big-endian configurations, unaligned accesses, page table walks, page fault handling, etc. Once you have used this, you will not go back to PDF.