Re: architectural goals, Byte Addressability And Beyond

In article <20240603130821.000076b3@yahoo.com>, already5chosen@yahoo.com
(Michael S) wrote:

jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) wrote:

In article <2024Jun3.074750@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:

SPARCs are big-endian and trap on unaligned access (at least
that was the case when I last used one long ago), while S/370
ff. does not trap on unaligned access.   

OK, that shoots down S/370 for this job.

What exactly is a job?
Is it for pure personal amusement or there are practical needs?

I would like to keep testing the commercial product I work on in a
big-endian, alignment-trapping environment. However, there isn't much
budget available for this. We have a SPARC box doing it, left over from
when we actually supported Solaris, but as testing grows, its CPU power
becomes less adequate for the job.

New SPARC boxes are expensive, dealing with Oracle is hard work, and the
architecture has no future.

I've never been very serious about using Linux on IBM Z for this - it's
expensive and dealing with IBM is hard work, although the architecture
still seems to have a future - but if it doesn't trap misaligned accesses,
it's disqualified.

John