[ephaeton]

I dearly remember setting up NetBSD on various sparc stations and ultra sparcs (a II, and an Ultra 60) and running them alongside a set of various other RISCs and CISCs of late 90s. Based on the paper 'attack of the lemmings' (IIRC) by matthias something (IIRC), I wanted to create a 'how to portably code C' course that would run with just the basic netbsd tools - compiler, editor, test system, make, ... - write once, commit, have the whole weird-ass machine park response to the unit test for a given exercise. Sadly never made it happen fully. Still - NetBSD! fun times, great documentation and such a knowledgeable crowd! Enjoy the voyage!

[chasil]

I am assuming that the major reason that you wanted to do this is that SPARC is big-endian. It works in the native order of TCP/IP, and the hton/ntoh macros are null at the socket level in C.

NetBSD can run Raspberry Pis big-endian. This is a much easier platform to obtain and configure than SPARC.

The targets appear to be earmv7hfeb and aarch64eb.

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/

[ephaeton]

yeah, machines of different endianness, and, ideally, different alignment requirements. Always wanted to get an alpha, as well. Had hpux / hp300 ?, sparc, sparc64, 386, x86_64, maybe another arch. This was in 2005'ish, mind you. Idea was to write code that would portably work on linux and netbsd on at least said architectures, ideally more.

[DonHopkins]

I has having lunch with some hardware designers from SGI and Sun, and the SGI people mentioned jokingly that the MIPS could be both big-endian and little-endian, which they called SPIM. Then they pointed out much to the embarrassment of the Sun people (including me at the time) that the little-endian version of the SPARC would be called CRAPS.