[OpenBSD]

OpenBSD/hppa

OpenBSD/hppa runs on a large set of the 32-bit Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture workstations and servers (HP PA-RISC).

A mailing list dedicated to the OpenBSD/hppa port is available at hppa@openbsd.org. To join the OpenBSD/hppa mailing list, send a message body of "subscribe hppa" to majordomo@openbsd.org. Please be sure to check our mailing list policy before subscribing.

The current port maintainer is Michael Shalayeff. Others are definitely welcome to contribute!

Table of contents

History:

This project was started in those days when the only open source operating systems for HP PA-RISC computers were Lites and MkLinux. These two sources were a major supply of information and code for initial development of the OpenBSD/hppa port. HPBSD is encumbered by HP proprietary code and USL licensing and is not publicly available. One of the major direct benefits from previous porting efforts (besides the code, of course) was support for HP PA-RISC in GCC and binutils, which allowed quick building of a cross-tools environment for development.

Later on, Hewlett-Packard decided to sponsor a Linux port to the PA-RISC family, which actually resulted in some proprietary documentation being released, even though their target was a different class of 9000 machines back then.

Current status:

Currently, all the supported systems boot multi-user, although not all of them can boot off disk. In addition to the release, full snapshots are made periodically, and work is ongoing to provide better hardware support.

Projects (in no particular order):

Supported hardware:

Supported models

The rule of thumb is: if it weighs more than 25kg -- most likely it is not supported.

Supported peripherals

The list of supported hardware below is not meant to be exhaustive. Hardware is needed for developers, to further help development and testing. Please see our "Wanted List" (contact mickey).

Unsupported models

The following systems may eventually work:

The following systems are very unlikely to be supported since they either have incompatible firmware (the 3000s) or almost completely undocumented I/O subsystems (the 8x7s).

These Convex systems are NUMA supercomputing clusters consisting of one or more 8-way SMP nodes with PA7100 or PA7200 CPUs. They are very unlikely to be ever supported.

These systems will, probably, never be supported by this port since they are of 1.0 PA-RISC architecture, which is substantially inferior to the 1.1:

Unsupported peripherals

This list is not meant to be exhaustive either, but sums up the most commonly encountered devices on hppa machines.

Hardware documentation:

Most of the following documents have been released by Hewlett-Packard for the PA-RISC Linux project.

  1. HP PA-RISC CPUs
    1. PA7100LC CPU ERS
    2. PA7300LC CPU ERS
  2. Processor Dependent Code/I/O Dependent Code Interface
    (selected chapters from "PA-RISC I/O Architecture Specification")
    1. PDC 1.1
    2. IODC 1.1
    3. Version and Identification Number Allocation
    4. Memory Data Formats 2.0
    5. PDC Procedures 2.0
    6. PDC Entry Points 2.0
    7. OS Interface 2.0
  3. Bus controllers/bridges/adaptors
    1. ASP
    2. LASI Core Bus Adapter (including lan, scsi, serial, lpt controllers)
    3. Dino PCI bridge, and Errata
    4. Elroy ERS (Edited for Open Source)
    5. Astro Overview, Error handling, R2I Operations, Registers Map, Runway Interface, System Mamory Map
  4. Stinger graphics
  5. NCR 53C700/710/720 SCSI I/O Processors (the doc is actually for 770, which is claimed as compatible)
  6. LSI 53C875 SCSI I/O Processor
  7. Intel i82596DX/SX and i82596CA Ethernet Controllers

Of course, no hppa page, be it OpenBSD or not, could pretend to be serious without linking to the essential OpenPA reference website.

Getting and installing OpenBSD/hppa:

The latest supported OpenBSD/hppa release is OpenBSD 3.5. Here are the OpenBSD/hppa 3.5 installation instructions .

Snapshots are made available from time to time, in this location as well as in a few mirrors. Here are the OpenBSD/hppa snapshot installation instructions as well.

Supported platforms
www@openbsd.org
$OpenBSD: hppa.html,v 1.131 2004/06/01 22:06:24 brad Exp $