UltraSPARC 16-bit assignments severely broken [analysis]

[Charles M. Hannum]

>> With gcc 2.95.2, configured for sparc64-elf
>
> GCC 2.95.2 doesn't fully support sparc64.  There are a couple of known
> bugs.

That is, unfortunately, a rather unhelpful answer.  The point of this
exercise is that I *need* a working UltraSPARC compiler, badly enough
that I'm willing to fix it myself.  I just want to know if people have
specific thoughts on which way I should do it.

Code inspection suggests that this particular bug is still present in
2.96, so `upgrading' is not going to me help me either.