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Subject: Re: Sparc64 doesn't care about you, and you shouldn't care about
 Sparc64
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From: Jan Bramkamp <crest@rlwinm.de>
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On 11/11/15 09:44, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2015-Nov-10 22:55:38 -0800, Jordan Hubbard <jkh@mail.turbofuzz.com> wrote:
>> Again, what’s the long-term goal of supporting this architecture?
>
> The things that sparc64 give us that x86 doesn't are big-endian and
> strict alignment.  In theory, MIPS, PPC and ARM can give us both of
> those but I'm non sure whether we actually have any big-endian
> variants of them.
>

These days the cheapest new MIPS64 system you can get is a Ubiquiti 
EdgeRouter Lite with dual-core 500MHz Cavium Octeon 1+. I don't know if 
they support little-endian but the FreeBSD port to them uses big-endian. 
Since the u-boot bootloader isn't locked down you can just modify the 
startup script and boot from either TFTP or local USB storage.