Not to revive a dead thread, but I ran across this tidbit from misc@ while searching for malloc features in OpenBSD that I'm blogging about...since it's so relevant to this thread I thought I'd post it here.
"(2) Tagged pointers. A tagged pointer is when you "know" that not
all the bits in a pointer are used to generate an address and
you squeeze some other data into the "spare" bits. This blocks
newer versions of Firefox on sparc64. Mozilla's new JavaScript
engine uses tagged pointers and those "unused" address bits on
x86 are actually used on sparc64."
That's (at least) one reason why Firefox on sparc64 was dropped.
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Linux/Network-Security Engineer by Profession. OpenBSD user by choice.
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