IA-64 and PA-RISC Binary Compatibility

[Clifford Loeb]

Can anyone tell me how HPUX on IA-64 supports PA-Risc binaries? And also, if
so, what are the performance impacts?

[Pete Conneely_1]

See URL:
http://devresource.hp.com/devresource/Docs/TechPapers/PrepareIA64.html for
good information on Preparing HP-UX Software for IA-64 and other IA64 related
documentation.

As a general comment:
Software Compatibility

Well-behaved PA-RISC binaries that run on HP-UX 11.x will run on HP-UX on
IA-64. The new IA-64 architecture was designed to enable binary compatibility
with the PA-RISC architecture. Source compatibility will also be provided
between HP-UX 11.x on IA-64 and HP-UX 11.x on PA-RISC.

In general, well-behaved applications are those that are not sensitive to the
architecture or operating system implementation. Well-behaved applications
follow these general guidelines for compatibility:

Use only public APIs.
Adhere to required practices that are specifically documented.
Do not use features that are specifically described as having platform,
architecture, or configuration limitations.
Do not decompose an HP-UX product and then re-use the results of the
decomposition.

These guidelines are described in more detail in the Coding Practices for
Compatibility paper, which can be found in the HP-UX 11.x Software Transition
Kit, see URL : http://devresource.hp.com/STK/index.html