PA-RISC Operating Systems
A broad range of operating systems is available for PA-RISC workstations and, to a lesser extent, servers. They are either Unix or Unix-like, with different designs having both been ported to and developed specifically for PA-RISC, including open source, research and commercial products. Most of the earlier efforts were distributed only to a small, academic circle and not available to the general public. The current open-source projects are available freely together with sources to the general public.
Commercial products
Few commercial operating systems support PA-RISC computers, with the most prominent Unix systems being HP-UX and NeXTSTEP. (HP also sells a real-time system for the HP 9000, HP-RT, not discussed here.)
HP-UX is HP’s own Unix version for PA-RISC computers. All PA-RISC computers from HP are supported by different versions of HP-UX.
» Go to the HP-UX page.
NeXTSTEP is an operating system based on a Mach microkernel with an Unix userland and a slick GUI, released for PA-RISC in 1994. Support for some 32-bit PA-RISC machines was available in Version 3.3, with limited hardware support.
» Go to the NeXTSTEP/hppa page
Open Source projects
Several open source operating systems support the PA-RISC architecture, including Linux, OpenBSD and NetBSD. They are all Unix-like.
PA-RISC Linux supports different machines from the newer 32 and 64-bit series though proper support is still missing for a lot of systems. Linux does not perform equally well as original HP-UX on PA-RISC systems and hardware support is limited.
» Go to the PA-RISC Linux page
OpenBSD/hppa supports most 32-bit systems, and some 64-bit systems in 32-bit mode. Newer machines running in full 64-bit mode are not supported and later will supposedly be by OpenBSD/hppa64.
» Go to the OpenBSD/hppa page
NetBSD supports several 32-bit machines, with support for newer machines ported over from OpenBSD. NetBSD/hp700 is not a major NetBSD effort; it supports some systems and most of the hardware OpenBSD/hppa supports.
» Go to the NetBSD/hp700 page
Research projects
Various research operating systems were ported to PA-RISC at different places over the time. All of these systems were BSD/Unix operating systems based mostly on the Mach microkernel. The ports were mostly development or research projects, and not operating systems releases in the formal sense. Many were developed at the University of Utah and later formed the starting point for PA-RISC ports of other operating systems (OpenBSD, Linux).
These ports include HPBSD, Mach-based Unix/BSD systems, Chorus, OSF/1 ports and MkLinux.
» Go to the PA-RISC R&D Operating Systems page