USA would be worst place possible for hosting project with focus of openbsd, that's a country that claimed encryption was a munition in the past, and still restricts it now. Modernizing? some platforms don't have any current system to modernize to, it's a question of getting used systems. the openbsd project does have a list of desired donation equipment: http://www.openbsd.org/want.ht...

Two of openbsd newer supported architectures are octeon MIPS64 and beagle ARMV7.

Don't know why you seem to imply embedded space is different than openbsd space. You do realize openbsd is used in the embedded space, even in some commercial elevator controllers (and plenty of other embedded system)? Some of their ports are for embedded devices

Still plenty of 64 bit sparc around, used for more than Oracle if we're just talking major uses. MRP, EPR, statistics packages, project management/scheduling, engineering, insurance all still markets for that iron. note #4 supercomputer in the world is sparc based. so still around and still relevant for things other than oracle. As for what openbsd will support, all the way up to Fujitsu Sparc64-VII with the 64 bit port.

Itanium not my favorite chip, but sales of servers based on it still over 4 billion USD a year. FreeBSD, Linux support some of those and NetBSD has port in the works. not an OpenBSD port but you seemed to think it was "dead". not yet, and intel will make new models until 2020 at least as per contract.

sure it's the developers hobby, but their wares are everywhere, from elevator controllers to routers to printers to servers.

Are you sure it's not relevant to you? Softwares from the OpenBSD project are in commercial controllers and appliances, in Linux distributions, in Mac OSX....

Similarly, 1 little endian - x64 - and 1 big endian - say current SPARC - should be adequate No, there are also alignment issue variations, not just endian ones. Current Sparc is bi-endian, by the way. You aren't into OS development or systems programming, I take it.

They have found emulators aren't perfect. They'd be in the emulator debugging business. And the devs who do alternative architecture for openbsd are familiar with various pipular emulators as those of us who follow obsd newsgroups know. Those project machines get heavy use for test/build