OpenPA.net

PA-RISC Linux

Overview

The Linux port to PA-RISC was started by The Puffin Group in November, 1998. By March 1999, HP started helping with equipment and more importantly, documentation.

Because of HP’s assistance, the machines targeted were newer than what other ports (e.g. OpenBSD or MkLinux) supported like the A180, B180 and 64-bit PA 2.0 systems. Nevertheless, parisc-linux also supports older HP 9000/700 systems like 712, 715 and 735.

Supported hardware

There is generally very broad support for the different PA-RISC systems in PA-RISC Linux. Most of the unlettered (i.e. the 700s) and the B/C/J-Class workstations are supported, both 32-bit (based on PA-7x00 processors) and 64-bit (PA-8x00) systems use the same distribution. SMP is supported, though not as smooth as on other Linux platforms or HP-UX and not necessarily with the theoretical (hardware) maximum of CPUs. PA-RISC Linux runs on most of the server systems, although several of those use more proprietary (weird) I/O and CPU/memory combinations and as such are unsupported.

Officially supported systems

Most I/O subsystems are supported, including many of the common PC expansion possibilities. Correct X11 (i.e. graphical) support is confined to a small set of HP adapters and some kind of framebuffer device. Unsupported are most notably the Fast-Wide SCSI, FDDI and audio subsystems on the older ASP-based systems (i.e. 735 and 755 et al). As the more modern machines are more PC-like, support is generally better but still lacking in some areas.

Performance is not quite up to the standards of original HP-UX — 50% is a fair rough estimate of the relative raw performance, although the overhead of a complete running HP-UX probably eats up much of this advantage, especially on slower systems.

Development

In the late 1990s PA-RISC was more or less the last big RISC/Unix architecture without a proper Linux port (besides the limited useful MkLinux and even more limited Mach 4/Lites). There were supposedly multiple reasons for this, as the PA-RISC systems were not widely used at academic entities and had more market share in the technical/industrial space, from which they did no escape for a long time to a broader userbase. Another fact was that HP was only reluctantly releasing technical documentation on their systems to the general public, even more limiting the target audience of PA-RISC.

A function of this confinement to industrial circles was a very limited hobbyist circle for PA-RISC, as the available machines were not well documented and more or less witout an available operating system for the private enduser (as compared to for instance the more popular Sun SPARC systems). Slow progress was made around 1999 with the initial start of the original Linux kernel on PA-RISC, as there seemed to be an growing interest in these machines (as more made their way into the second-hand market), and finally more and more documentation was released.

PA-RISC Linux/Puffingroup

The primary center of (kernel and toolchain) development is the offical PA-RISC Linux project. They host a great range of resources, including access to the source code via CVS and CVSWeb, mailing lists for users and developers, installation instructions, an extensive array of documentation and a very useful hardware database.

Early work started in 1999 with the help of The Puffin Group, later employing several kernel and toolchain hackers. Development was at first directed towards 32-bit systems, later on, also through the help of Hewlett Packard, more modern machines were made available to developers, resulting in generally broader hardware and 64-bit support. Parts of the kernel PA-RISC support (most of the trickier ones) were written by HP employees participating in the project. The PA-RISC Linux affiliations changed throughout the last years, HP and developer support fluctuated but the port now reached a very stable state.

ESIEE

Contributed by Thibaut Varene

The PA-RISC Linux port effort started at ESIEE in December 1999, with Thierry Simonnet (who was then managing the General IT Resources Service at ESIEE) getting involved in the early stages of the port. By mid September 2000, Simonnet decided to get students involved, and he started a case study for students to participate in as part of their school curriculum. The study was conducted in parallel by HP Labs, who massively sponsored the effort of the school, being one of its long time key partner. This enabled the students to rapidly acquire skills and credibility, and the study was completed in February 2001, and presented at Linux Expo in Paris, and several months later at the Debian 1 Conference in Bordeaux, France. With its increasing success, the initial case study spawned into a larger project that was open to students either on their free time or as part of their classes, and more of them joined what was to be called the PATeam. From 2001 to the end of 2003, the team has been very active, doing numbers of development in the Linux kernel (writing drivers and improving overall stability).

Unfortunately, in 2004 and thereafter, ESIEE gradually reduced its support for the project, and nowadays it doesn't support it anymore, save for website and machines hosting.

Distributions

As of late 2005 there are two popular Linux distributions that include the PA-RISC port: Debian and Gentoo.

Debian

Debian includes PA-RISC Linux as Debian/hppa in the 3.1 (aka ’sarge') and 3.0 (aka 'woody') releases. CDs can be ordered as media or downloaded as ISO-images from several Debian FTP mirrors in the 3.1_*/hppa (or 3.0_*/hppa) directories.

Gentoo

Gentoo was the second distribution which included a PA-RISC port. Gentoo is completely compiled from source and uses a BSD-style ports system.

References

PA-RISC Linux: HARDWARE SUPPORT
General, textual description of the supported hardware. The PARISC-Linux Project (Dec 2005).
ESIEE PA/Linux Detailed Hardware Support
Detailed status listing with further references. ESIEE The PA/Linux Team (Jan 2007).
Linux on PA-RISC. One Martini Too Many (PDF, 80KB)
Paper for OLS2000 on the early state of the PA-RISC Linux port. Matthew Wilcox (July 2000).

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