[coreboot] Time for a new project

[Philip Schulz]

Hi Jordan,

 please don't take my comments as criticism, I'm merely trying to
learn something from this discussion.

2008/4/13, Jordan Crouse <jordan.crouse at amd.com>:
> On 11/04/08 16:43 -0700, ron minnich wrote:
>  > So, ignore me if you will, but how about
>  > 'CODE'
>  > 'DATA'
>  > 'BSS '
>  > 'NAME'
>  > 'NOTE'
>  > 'ENTR'
>
> I dig this.  We will make it so.  I think we should also force all the
>  header members to be little endian to avoid issues later on with
>  PowerPC.
>

I wonder what issues with PowerPC you're expecting? Shouldn't you have
the header members stored in the endianness of the target
architecture? I.e. if you construct a SELF file for i386, then of
course the header fields should be little endian, even if you chose to
construct the file on a PowerPC machine. But not if you want to use
the SELF file on a big endian architecture - then the headers should
be big endian.

In a later email in this thread, you say this:

2008/4/13, Jordan Crouse <jordan.crouse at amd.com>:
[...]
>  We already know what endianism, word size and architecture we're going to
>  run on - SELF is not intended to be portable.  It is constructed when
>  the LAR is, and is married to that LAR and that LAR only.  And before
>  somebody says something, yes - this is not fool-proof.  Somebody will
>  no doubt manage to screw it up and get the wrong SELF on the wrong
>  architecture.  But I don't like over-architecting to protect fools.
>  Worrying about specifying the architecture here is the computer science
>  equivalent of the "Caution, coffee is hot"  warning.

I interpreted the above like this: When constructing a SELF file you
will always know what architecture the SELF file will be used on and
you therefore don't need an explicit endianness flag. You don't need
it b/c you implicitly assume the byte order of the target
architecture.

So I may have misunderstood your emails, but please don't force the
SELF headers to a specific endianness. I don't think it's necessary
and doing so will cause unnecessary work as soon as you're trying to
use the format on an architecture w/ different endianness. See EFI and
especially TianoCore.

Regards,

Phil