[hythloday]

From Theo de Raadt, on-thread:

  On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all
  platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the
  platforms we run, following that they are fixed.  It is a harsh
  reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved.

[luckydude]

We used to maintain SGI boxes for this same reason but we've pulled back. The main benefit we got from older RISC stuff was that they bitched about unaligned loads. If you are going to support any of those models you need at least one box like that in your cluster. SPARC was faster than MIPS so we kept SPARC.

I think Theo could probably thin down the cluster and still be good but maybe I'm wrong and he'll show up with examples that require all of that hardware. That would be interesting because in our case we've sorted out the problems and rarely see things blow up on the RISC boxen.

[rch]

I was trying to think of a good way to say exactly this, but he says it better (and more authoritatively) than I ever could. Broad platform support is a significant factor contributing to overall quality in products like *BSD, and it's apparent in looking at the source.