HP-UX upgrade PA-RISC to Itanium, compiled Oracle forms

[mr_red]

Hi everyone!

We are moving from HP-UX 11.11 on a PA-RISC to HP-UX to HP-UX 11.31 on Itanium.

The problem that we are using some applications with compiled oracle forms files (fmx) and C programs and libraries that we don't have the code source.

I've read, on wikipedia, that HP-UX 11.2 provide support for running PA-RISC compiled applications on Itanium systems. Does it still the case for 11.31 version ? or do I need to find the sources (which is very hard) and recompile again

[Patrick Wallek]

The functions you are thinking of is called Aries. This allows PA-RISC programs to run on Itanium servers.  Yes, this is suppported on 11.31.

Be aware that there is overhead associated with running programs via Aries so they may or may not perform as fast as you expect.

[Rajesh K Chaurasia · Accepted solution]

Since you don't have the source code for the application only feasible option to move over the applications from PA-RISC to Integrity is through HP ARIES dynamic binary translator. Note that the ARIES emulation works at whole process level. You cannot have a mix of PA-RISC/Itanium executables and libraries. With ARIES, you need to have all dependencies (executables, libraries, third party components) as PA-RSIC. It depends how forms are used - plugin, library,, executables, scripts etc. ARIES emulated processes can communicate with Integrity native processes through standard Unix IPC mechanisms and RPCs. Thus if it is possible to spit the application environment as client-server, you can deploy server part as Integrity native and use client applications under ARIES.

On the performance part, ARIES emulation causes performance and resource (CPU avrage load, increase in process RSS) overhead. While deploying PA-RISC software under ARIES on Itanium 9300 series based Integrity servers, performance could be comparable with PA8800/PA8900 based servers. If migrating off old PA-RISC based servers, ARIES emulation could still be comparatively faster. If not using floating point intensive or Java based applications under ARIES, performance impact may not be much.

Regards

-Rajesh

[mr_red]

Thank you for quick answer !