nick@sura.net (Nick Lemberos) (04/13/91)
does anyone have any SOLID information about BSD for the HP 700 series? I have heard rumours of Mt. Xinu and elsewhere but nothing solid. (a quick call to Mt. Xinu said "HP series what?"). I would appreciate any info (phone numbers, Email..etc) of vendors or installations running BSD 4.3 on HP 700 hardware.
mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta) (04/22/91)
In article <1991Apr12.173713.6364@sura.net> nick@sura.net (Nick Lemberos) writes: >does anyone have any SOLID information about BSD for the HP 700 series? >I have heard rumours of Mt. Xinu and elsewhere but nothing solid. >(a quick call to Mt. Xinu said "HP series what?"). I was informed from kawasaki@adac.co.jp that Mt. Xinu is supporting BSD for 300 series (CISC). Later, from iso@tky.hp.com mailed be that BSD for 800 series (RISC) may be released soonly from Utah. This information is apparently not solid. Masataka Ohta
lepreau%mancos.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Jay Lepreau) (04/23/91)
This is "dispel rumor" time. I head the Utah group involved with systems software on HP hardware, which HP IAG's Research Grants Program helps support. The University of Utah, mt Xinu, and UCB's CSRG distribute a 4.3 BSD port to the series 300 and in some cases, series 400 systems. These are Motorola 68K systems and contain *NO* series 800 or 700 (PA-RISC) support. There is no series 700 "snake" BSD available from anyone. There will not be one for some time, if ever. DETAILS Background: the series 300/400, 700, and 800 all have completely different I/O busses. The 815/832 has yet another I/O bus. All share peripherals to varying degrees. Between series 800 and 700, the bus difference is much more important than the PA architecture difference (PA 1.0 vs 1.1). When we get adequate docs and sources we will be starting a quick and dirty 700 BSD port, available only to "wizards" that also have the right HP source licenses. Further work at Utah is highly questionable. I think it is unlikely that mt Xinu would pick up our 4.3 700 port. If things rolled the right way and resources were made available to them it's possible that CSRG might pick it up to roll into 4.4 BSD. Internally we are running a BSD port to the 834 and 835. However, it is not currently distributable because it contains some HP proprietary code. We also have a Mach 3.0 port to the 834/5 which is pretty much all our own code, but it's not ready to be sent out. CMU is taking our 800 Mach port and BSD snake work and doing a Mach 3.0 snake port. Note that Mach 3.0 is currently a platform for research, not production. And don't hold your breath for any of these. My recommendation? Get an OSF/1 beta release from HP which rumors have it will be available to universities by late summer, and will look a lot like BSD on the outside. (So should Vr4 for that matter.) I have no first-hand experience with either, however. GCC/GAS/GDB In a week or two we will release PA-RISC gcc 1.39, gas, and gdb for the 800 and 700 series, runnable on HP-UX. We'll post here when this happens. gcc 1.37 is currently available for anonymous ftp from jaguar.utah.edu in pub/pa-gcc.tar.Z. Code quality is moderate; new PA 1.1 instructions are not supported. We will soon start work, with support from Hitachi, on gcc version 2 for the PA. Version 2 supports instruction scheduling so the code should be better. Jay Lepreau lepreau@cs.utah.edu