Evan Rowley <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello OpenBSD Devs, > > Hopefully this bug-related question will not be too off-topic. I was > curious as to the reason for continued SPARC support and saw this > interesting sentence on the sparc64 page > (https://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html). > > "The other architectures that OpenBSD supports have benefited because > some kinds of bugs are exposed more often by the 64-bit big endian > nature of UltraSPARC" > > I would like to further understand how the "64-bit big endian nature" > helps in practice and be able to point someone who is curious to > specific examples where there was a positive impact. Are there > particular discussions on this mailing list which demonstrate this > unique quality of the SPARC ISA for OpenBSD?
The text is a little overplayed. All architectural variations have the potential to expose certain classes of problems before they are exposed on another architecture. This also happens with cars, space craft, bridges. In our experience, sparc64 has done the best job of finding bugs earlier due to register windows, stackghost, big-endian, strict-alignment, and a variety of other differences from other architectures. sparc64 walks off the "boring cpu" roadmap furthers, so it hits issues earlier. The specific list you ask for doesn't exist.
