Hi everyone! It’s my first blog post, be gentle.

So I’m not really very good about this whole blogging thing, as evidenced by my complete lack of postings over the summer. But you’ve got to get started somewhere, so here it goes. 🙂

For those that aren’t familiar with what I do around here, I help to keep the PowerPC port of Gentoo up to date. Lately, this has been mostly on the documentation side of things due to time constraints, but that’s okay, every little bit helps!

So what else have I been doing? Well, besides going back to University for the first time in 2 years, I’ve been working on finishing the specs for the Broadcom 43xx series of wireless chips. We recently started documenting the Version 4 driver series which includes a new, incompatible transmit header format. One interesting thing about adding support for the Version 4 driver is that there is a public place to get the firmware from Broadcom. This means we could potentially offer an ebuild for bcm43xx-firmware in the future. 🙂 Also, this driver includes much more debugging information than previous drivers, so the new specs should be much more complete than the previous “Version 3” specs.

I’ve also started poking at the SD/MMC driver for the Sharp Zaurus (I’ve got an SL-5000D), and I was happy to find that ARM assembly is actually not all that hard to read. I really like the postfix conditionals and the way they clean up simple conditional statements. Branching for an if/else in other assembly languages seems like such overkill now!

Finally, I’ve been working on a new version of xac (my SoC X configuration tool). The best new feature is the ability to add additional monitors through a dialog based “GUI”. I’m hoping to get the last few issues worked out soon, but it really depends on the amount of free time I have in the next week.