Yes, my ppc64 machine is also little endian. If the issue was not an
intermittent but a permanent
failure I would look for something like that. I would think it's more some sort
of initialization
issue, like a value on the stack that occasionally set to an undesirable value
-- maybe even in a
dependency.
I found I still had access to an s390x machine. ~2700 loops on this test case
so far but nothing... it would be good to be able to recreate the issue and
apply the fix but we'll have to do it without testing then I guess.