[SunRescue] Q on "optimal" OS for Sun4c machines, now that Solaris 8 won't run

[jwbirdsa at picarefy.picarefy.comjwbirdsa]

>I don't know but I've heard that one of Intel's next generation chips
>(Merced? If that still exists) can do the same.

   I don't know of any that "figure it out", but chips of switchable
endianness are nothing new, even for Intel. The 80960 could do so circa
1991. My employer at the time was developing emulators for several versions
of the 80960, and while I wasn't working on them myself, I know that that
feature gave the developers a lot of hell. IIRC, the endianness could be
flipped programmatically, so it could for example support per-process
endianness with an appropriately written kernel. When you're trying to
disassemble the instruction stream based on snooping memory fetches, the
last thing you need is for the world to turn upside down.

   --James B.