HPUX on Itanium

[Lacrosse]

Is HPUX actually running native on the Itanium or is there some sort of translator inbetween also if running Oracle is it running in full native mode (no emulation like Aries dynamic translator)
Thanks for the help

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Yes, HP-UX does run native on Itanium. The latest version is 11i V2 (11.23), I think. I believe there is an Oracle version that runs native on Itanium as well. You probably do have to request that version specifically if you are ordering the CDs though.

[Gregory Fruth]

HP-UX 11.2x is native on Itanium (IPF).
However, at least on 11.22 (v1.6) some
system components (e.g. SAM and the SD-UX
commands) are PA-RISC executables running
under emulation (aka Aries). Presumably
under 11.23 (v2.0) some of these have been
made IPF native.

User programs can be IPF native or PA-RISC.
If PA-RISC, the kernel will transparently
invoke Aries to run them under emulation.

HTH

[doug hosking]

The HP-UX kernel definitely runs native.

Yes, Gregory, in 11i v2 (11.23) there are even fewer exceptions re what runs native. The SD tools now run native, for example.
$ file /usr/sbin/swpackage
/usr/sbin/swpackage: ELF-32 executable object file - IA64

No doubt the number of non-native exceptions (already quite small) will continue to shrink in future releases. Thankfully, Aries is reliable enough and fast enough that in some cases it's simply not a priority to rebuild an application to run native.

SAM, for example, is mostly a front end to other applications that already run native. Wringing the last few percent of
performance out of it by running native really doesn't buy you a lot when the majority of the CPU time is spent in the things SAM calls (already running native) rather than in SAM itself.