Re: Linux on PA/RISC

Martin von Loewis (martin@mira.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de)
Thu, 17 Apr 1997 09:18:37 +0200


> Considering that the team at Utah University was responsible from
> merging the Mach VM system into BSD, I bet they were the ones actually
> doing the PA-RISC work.

Yes indeed. They've also ported gcc and binutils to PA first.
However, I believe that the mklinux port to PA mentioned on
http://www.gr.osf.org/mklinux/index.htm
was developed indepently at the OSF RI. OSF/Mach 6 is somewhat different
from CMU/Utah Mach 4. For example, the former uses collocated servers to
get some speed, the latter doesn't.

> On the other hand, neither NetBSD nor OpenBSD has an PA-RISC port, which
> makes me doubt about whether BSD has ever run on the PA.

Of course, there are various ports of BSD servers to Mach. CMU was
always using a BSD server, and there is a good chance that Lites also
runs on top of Mach 4 on HPPA.
As for native ports, Theo de Raadt apparently plans a port of OpenBSD
to PA (see http://www.openbsd.org/hppa.html). AFAIK, this is the only
effort in this direction.

And a word on performance: The OSF guys made a Mach release that does
HP-UX emulation, to a degree that you just replace /hp-ux, reboot, and
everything continues to work. Mach 6 supports HP-UX 9, Mach 7.2 does
HP-UX 10 as well. They claim to be actually *faster* than HP-UX, at least
compared to 9.0x. That's what I read a while ago, couldn't find
it again. So there is a good chance that mklinux is of similar performance
as HP-UX. Of course, as Alan points out: A native port would be more
comparable architecture-wise.

Regards,
Martin