Somewhat entertainingly the sparc64 gcc will not compile perl
		with -mcpu=v8, (or v9, sparclet or sparclite), while a sun4m
		sparc can. I think I'll just avoid -mcpu on my ultra for now :/

Well, the sparc64 gcc only generates v9 code, so -mcpu=v8 won't work
at all.  If it's configured correctly to generate 32-bit binaries (and
not all toolchains can do that) then -32 may have some effect.  But
what you have basically discovered is that perl is buggy.  Have you tried
the pkgsrc version of perl?  It should be fixed to build on -current.

Eduardo