Earlier this year, I was trying to get actual daily work done on HP-UX 11.11 (11i v1) running on HP’s last and greatest PA-RISC workstation, the HP c8000. After weeks of frustration caused first by outdated software no longer working properly with the modern web, and then by modern software no longer compiling on HP-UX 11.11, I decided to play the ace up my sleeve: NetBSD’s pkgsrc has support for HP-UX. Sadly, HP-UX is obviously not a main platform or even a point of interest for pkgsrc developers – as it should be, nobody uses this combination – so various incompatibilities and more modern requirements had snuck into pkgsrc, and I couldn’t get it to bootstrap. I made some minor progress here and there with the help of people far smarter than I, but in the end I just lacked the skills to progress any further.
This story will make it to OSNews in a more complete form, I promise.
Anyway, in May of this year, it seems Brian Robert Callahan was working on a very similar problem: getting pkgsrc to work properly on IBM’s AIX.
The state of packages on AIX genuinely surprises me. IBM hosts a repository of open source software for AIX. But it seems pretty sparse compared to what you could get with pkgsrc. Another website offering AIX packages seems quite old. I think pkgsrc would be a great way to bring modern packages to AIX.
I am not the first to think this. There are AIX 7.2 pkgsrc packages available at this repository, however all the packages are compiled as 32-bit RISC System/6000 objects. I would greatly prefer to have everything be 64-bit XCOFF objects, as we could do more with 64-bit programs. There also aren’t too many packages in that repository, so I think starting fresh is in our best interest.
As we shall see, this was not as straightforward as I would have hoped.
↫ Brian Robert Callahan
Reading through his journey getting pkgsrc to work properly on AIX, I can’t help but feel a bit better about myself not being to get it to work on HP-UX 11.11. Callahan was working with AIX 7.2 TL4, which was released in November 2019 and still actively supported by IBM on a maintained architecture, while I was working with HP-UX 11.11 (or 11i v1), which last got some updates in and around 2005, running on an architecture that’s well dead and buried. Looking at what Callahan still had to figure out and do, it’s not surprising someone with my lack of skill in this area couldn’t get it working.
I’m still hoping someone far smarter than I stumbles upon a HP c8000 and dives into getting pkgsrc to work on HP-UX, because I feel pkgsrc could turn an otherwise incredibly powerful HP c8000 from a strictly retro machine into something borderline usable in the modern world. HP-UX is much harder to virtualise – if it’s even possible at all – so real hardware is probably going to be required. The NetBSD people on Mastodon suggested I could possibly give remote access to my machine so someone could dive into this, which is something I’ll keep under consideration.
I could consider granting access to my c8000, as I have the infrastructure in place for remote access and it already sits in its own dedicated VLAN. I could also keep my install safe (I use it) and grant access to a fresh install.
And a note on the article… yes, you explicitly pass pthread because you get phtread as well in something like IRIX but then you also find older Mach with cthreads.
At the end of the day, for the stuff I write myself, I use a wrapper and just ignore more specific functionality from cthreads, for example.
NetBSD / pkgsrc developer here. I’d take you up on that offer. I have a C3700, but a C8000 would make compiling much faster. Can you send an e-mail to [email protected]?
Email sent.
Hey, if it happens I want pictures. Pictures of the machine, screenshots and pictures of Thom suffering !!!! 🙂
Hey – I use my C8000 and HP-UX very often and, honestly, it’s so distraction-free and pleasant.
For fun, I was writing a small classic OpenGL 1.2 mini game thing, did all the coding in Softbench (I quite like it), edited textures in GIMP. I can print directly to my postscript printer and web browsing (Firefox via remote X11) works perfectly fine when you have gigabit ethernet. You can even watch 320p youtube.
For $dayjob, I can log into things via Firefox and remote in anything that I can operate via terminal. I only don’t get my machine to do some server duties and leave it up 24/7 (it is the quietest classic unix workstation I have, besides the 712/60), because it truly gets really really really hot and it is unbearable during summer. During winter, I use it often and I keep the radiators closed in my office room.