Re: Virtualizing HP PA-RISC unix station other than B160L

[Warner Losh]

Hey Thierry,

I'm answering the following as with my 'Unix history buff' hat on, not due to direct knowledge of HP PA and porting to it.

I used an HP/Snake workstation for about 9 months back in the day is as close as I got..

On Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 6:57 PM <thierry.briot@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

 

Thank you for your answers.

First of all, I made a mistake : the HP-UX 10.20 kernel (vmunix) is in the /stand (not /boot) filesystem.

I tried replacing /stand of the physical machine iso image with the /stand filesytem of the emulated B160L because I supposed that drivers are linked with the vmunix kernel. Maybe it's false.

http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/man/hpux/hpux.1.html has the boot loader manual in it for HP-UX 10.20.

http://www.datadisk.co.uk/html_docs/hp/hpux_cs.htm has a number of interesting tid-bits that might be useful in reconfiguring.

IIRC, in the early days, you needed to rebuild / reconfigure kernels for each different kind of system, so you may have

some issues there (though the model numbers are close enough you may not need to)...

Furthermore, the /dev tree is important for dealing with the drivers.

HP UX 11 introduced devfs, so 10.20 has the mknod entries in the filesystem.

I will continue to search for which files are hardware related. Maybe someone has done this research before ?

I haven't done so for HP-UX, but I've done a lot unix history things. 10.20 was released in 1996 so it's late enough

to have things like devfs and loadable kernel modules. However, HP-UX lagged the cutting edge by a number of

years, despite HP having had a good head start at all things Unix... So there's some things that are decidedly

retro about it that will be quite unfamiliar unless you (a) lived "the good old days" or (b) studied the good old

days...

Good luck with this...

Warner

 

 

Best regards,

Thierry

 

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
Envoyé : dimanche 5 septembre 2021 22:32
À : Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>; thierry.briot@gmail.com
Cc : qemu-devel@nongnu.org Developers <qemu-devel@nongnu.org>; linux-parisc <linux-parisc@vger.kernel.org>
Objet : Re: Virtualizing HP PA-RISC unix station other than B160L

 

Hi Thierry,

 

On 9/5/21 3:24 PM, Richard Henderson wrote:

> On Sun, 5 Sep 2021, 10:30 , <thierry.briot@gmail.com <mailto:thierry.briot@gmail.com>> wrote:

> For my company (Nexter Systems, France), I am using qemu-system-hppa

> for virtualizing HP PA-RISC workstations. That works well. You have

> made a very good job !

 

Thanks.

 

> But my machines are other than B160L (for example B180L), and I have

> to completely reinstall HP-UX on each emulated machine.

> If I do an iso system disk image of my B180L, this iso isn't bootable

> on qemu-system-hppa.

> 

> Thus, my questions are :

> 

> * Is it planned to emulate other HP unix workstations than B160L (for

> example B180L) ?

 

Maybe at some point a 64-bit capable system, e.g. C3000, and maybe an older 32-bit system, e.g. 715/64.

For the 64bit system additions to the emulated firmware and additional 64-bit qemu support is necessary, and for the 715/64 we need an additional NCR710 SCSI driver.

Both are lots of work.

 

The B180L is exactly the same as the B160L, with just a faster CPU:

https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-visualize_b132l_b160l_b180l.html

 

> * Or, what changes should I make to my iso image to do it usable ? If

> I replace the /boot /stand filesystem of the B180L image with the B160L one,

> I get a kernel panic at boot time.

 

I don't know HP-UX so well. I could imagine that your physical machines have different SCSI controller cards which are used by HP-UX, and which aren't emulated in qemu yet. That's maybe why qemu can't boot your already installed images.

If you post the output I maybe can give more info.

 

> Helge is the one that did all the hw support, I just did the CPU.

> There are no real plans to do another machine. I'm not familiar with

> the specs between the HP machines to know how much work that would be.

 

There is a very good overview of the various HP machines at openPA:

https://www.openpa.net/systems/

 

Helge