HEADS UP! MAJOR change to FreeBSD/sparc64

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 1:12 PM -0800 3/16/04, Wes Peters wrote:
>On Sunday 14 March 2004 05:34 pm, Stephen McKay wrote:
>
>  > If the intention is to use the sparc conversion is as the
>  > template for architectures I care about then now is the
>  > first time I can contribute to improving the process.
>
>sparc64 is, afaik, the last 64 bit architecture to change
>over to 64BTT.

PowerPC is still 32-bTT, and I think that's a 64-bit architecture.
But the people working on that have talked about switching to
64-bTT before PowerPC becomes a tier-1 platform.

>The 32 bit architectures don't matter because the likelihood
>of them  surviving until when 32BTT becomes a problem is nil.
>(That's probably true  of the sparc64 architecture too, but
>keeping sparc64 in line with the rest  of the 64-bitters is
>a good idea.)

I should also note that a big reason I wanted sparc64 to be 64-bTT
is that it's a big-endian architecture, so bugs in the handling of
time_t will show up differently on it than on ia64 or amd64.  By
moving sparc64 to 64-bTT right now, we will notice bugs right now
that we might not notice on the other platforms for quite some
time -- even though the bug would exist on all 64-bTT platforms.

[I may have mentioned that before. I forget if I did]

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu