HP-UX Emulation in Lites 1.1.u2

This version of Lites now includes support for running HP-UX binaries on PA-RISC machines. Most general applications from HP-UX 9.x (including socket-based TCP/IP applications) should run correctly under this release, with the following exceptions:

Grabbing a Mach kernel and Lites server/emulator and installing them on your HP-UX machine will not work. At this time HP-UX emulation is inadequate to run ``native'' from an HP-UX disk.
Occasionally programs will fail with signal handling problems. There are likely to be interesting signal race conditions between a process and the emulator (e.g., code using the sequence sigpause(sigblock())). We are finding and fixing these on a catch-as-catch-can basis. Additionally, we do not yet support taking signals on a user-specified stack.
Bourne and C-shells do not work (however, the POSIX Bourne shell and the Korn shell do, but the latter mishandles job control).
Incomplete support for System V shared memory; applications using this will likely fail.
Locking with lockf(2) always succeeds, but no locking is done.
Lacks support for poll(2) (however select(2) works).
Support for the HP-UX X11 server is the main goal of this on-going project.

If you wish to play with HP-UX binary support, you will have to supply your own HP-UX binaries and shared libraries either by copying them to the host environment or executing them across NFS. Note that many binaries will require that other HP-UX files be installed in ``standard'' places. For example, any dynamically linked HP-UX binary will require /lib/dld.sl.

In summary, limited HP-UX binary support is now available. While this may be ``useful,'' it is not what you really want--X11 support or a native HP-UX environment. The latter will require HP-UX filesystem support in the server and is currently not a goal.

Jeff Forys < forys@cs.utah.edu>

September 6, 1995

Note: Jeff is from Buffalo