[OpenPower-Firmware] A few questions about early hostboot

[Marty E. Plummer]

Greetings.

I have a few additional questions about early hostboot on the power9
platform.

I know pdbg has a gdbserver which currently only works on p8 and linux
kernel (though I may be misinterpreting the latter half). I assume the
lack of power9 support is just some missing code for now, but I wonder
about only supporting the linux kernel. Is there some deep-seated reason
one could not use gbdserver on hostboot itself? It could be very useful
for early debugging.

Power9 processors are able to operate in both BE and LE mode, and I am
having a bit of issue following this idea. Is there some register one
sets to switch mode I'm missing, or does the processor just 'know' that
0xdeadbeef and 0xefbeadde are the same? Forgive me if this is a bad
example but hopefully it gets my point across. In addition, is there any
reason that hostboot couldn't be ran in either big or little endian
(after endian specific code is fixed, obviously)?