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HP-UX

Overview

HP-UX is HP’s Unix operating system. First released in 1986 on the HP 9000/500 series with HP FOCUS CPUs, HP-UX in its current version 11i runs on most PA-RISC 1.1 and 2.0 and Itanium 2 computers from HP.

Until version 9.x HP-UX had very strong BSD Unix influences (and supposedly was very close to HPBSD); from versions 10.x onward it became more close to the System V line of Unix (SVR4). The PA-RISC version of HP-UX including 10.20 were split into different releases for workstations (HP 9000/700) and servers (800). HP-UX 10.20 was quite popular, since it ran very smoothly on older systems and had support for most available PA-RISC hardware.

From HP-UX 11.00 onward, unified releases were made for servers and workstations (700s and 800s). The 11 line of HP-UX was the first complete 64-bit version with support for the 64-bit features 64-bit PA-8x00 processors.

HP-UX 10.20

HP-UX 10.20 is quite fast on all supported machines with at least 64 MB RAM. Most administration tasks can be done using the sam system administration manager: e.g., adding devices, configuring the kernel, X server, network and mounting filesystems.

Different releases were made for HP 9000/700 workstations and the HP 9000/800 servers.

System requirements

Supported systems

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HP-UX 11.00

Version 11.00 is HP’s first Unix to implement a full 64-bit kernel. Nevertheless, it still runs on a number of systems featuring a 32-bit CPU. All HP 9000/800 servers with at least a PA-7000 should be supported, although some expansion options have been discontinued for those systems. Official support for HP 9000/700 workstations was only continued for those systems featuring at least a PA-7100LC CPU. With careful review of the newer OS patches older systems with e.g., PA-7100 and PA-7150 CPUs can also be made to run 11.00.

11.00 can run in either 64-bit or 32-bit mode on systems with a PA2.0 processor (i.e. at least PA-8000) or in 32-bit mode on all PA1.1 processors.

System requirements

Supported systems

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HP-UX 11i (11.11)

Version 11i (or 11.11) is the latest HP-UX release for PA-RISC based computers and extends the hardware support from 11.00 to more high-end systems as e.g., SuperDome featuring up to 128 CPUs. As this is the current active HP-UX release most patches and available software are geared towards 11i. The 11i CD sets were/are made available bi-annually, newer releases always include current patch sets and software enhancements.

There are different versions of HP-UX 11i targeting different system families:

System requirements

The list of officially supported systems was reduced even further compared to 11.00, with support for older systems was phased out. In some cases officially unsupported systems can run 11i, though with a sometimes complicated installation and careful review of operting systems patches afterward. Since patches are generally shipped with newer versions, older systems need older HP-UX installation releases (CDs).

11i generally has the same requirements as 11.00, although 256 MB of RAM should be the minimum for a graphical environment.

Support for several I/O subsystems and devices ended with 11i — this includes various networking, graphics and bus adapters (see the release notes for exact information). EISA is generally unsupported with 64-bit 11i.

HP-UX 11i v1 supported systems

HP-UX 11i v2 supported systems

HP-UX 11i v3 supported systems

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Software for HP-UX

Repositories

Documentation

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Further reading

Manuals

Websites

Release notes

Other documents

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