Actually you can do both BE and LE Linux on them, it's just that IBM is pushing development towards LE at the moment. I suppose it's a plan to make it easier for X86 developers to migrate over and/or encourage movement to POWER8+.
FreeBSD only supports BE on POWER. POWER9 is slightly biased towards BE but has a toggle at the logical partition level for BE vs LE so it works well either way. There are only a few instructions that don't work in LE mode (load/store multiple, move-assist). On Fri, Jul 6, 2018, at 12:25 PM, Peter J. Philipp wrote: > On Fri, Jul 06, 2018 at 12:15:02PM -0500, Brandon Bergren wrote: > > I'm also interested in 64 bit PPC, as I have a Talos II (dual POWER9) and > > have a second machine coming soon for driver debugging work (Talos II Lite > > "special developer system" -- > > https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS1/intro.html ) > > > > I'm currently spending time doing driver debugging on FreeBSD, but would > > prefer using OpenBSD. I don't have an actual background in driver/kernel > > development but I'm starting to learn. > > I've had my eyes on such a system in the past (one can only dream). As far as > I can remember Linux is using it in Little Endian byte order, and I don't > know what FreeBSD is doing. I think up to POWER8 or something you should > only > go Big Endian byte order. I'm sticking with Big Endian byte order for now as > that's what's in powerpc arch. > > I must say I learned a whole lot today working on this. Hopefully I won't get > confused. > > Nice system you have! > > -peter -- Brandon Bergren Technical Generalist
