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To: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 29 Sep 2003 14:53:04 CDT."
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Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 22:04:47 +0200
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Subject: Re: 5.2-RELEASE TODO 
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In message <20030929195304.GA74320@dan.emsphone.com>, Dan Nelson writes:

>> In my book sparc64 is also with one foot in the grave. As is Sun
>> itself.
>
>Fujitsu makes sparc-compatible CPUs, too, so it'll be harder to kill
>the entire architecture like HP did with the Alpha.

Having at least on architecture with the other byte order helps
keep our code honest.  I also think that VM afflicted people tend
to think that it is a good idea to have another model in order to
keep MI separated properly from MD.

Alpha has sort of outlived its role as our "token architecture",
"pc98" doesn't qualify due to inbreeding, "amd64" doesn't qualify
due to nepotism, "ia64" is not yet there.  That leaves us only
"sparc64" as candidate for that job.

Therefore I would like to keep the sparc64 port alive, even at a
pretty high cost in effort.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.