HP-UX

HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system. It runs on their PA-RISC range of processors and Intel's Itanium processor, and was also available for later Apollo/Domain systems. Earlier versions also ran on the HP 9000 Series 200, 300, and 400 computer systems based on the Motorola 68000 series of processors, as well as the HP 9000 Series 500 computers based on HP's proprietary FOCUS processor architecture.

HP-UX was the first Unix to use access control lists for file access permissions rather than the standard Unix permissions system. HP-UX was also among the first Unix systems to include a built-in Logical Volume Manager, a derivative of the Veritas volume manager. HP has had a long partnership with Veritas, and they use VxFS as their primary file system. For technical reasons, however, the file system used for the boot kernel has remained HFS (a variant of UFS) and so this older technology has continued to receive support from HP.

Following the merger of HP with Compaq in 2001, plans were made to merge the Tru64 TruCluster technology with HP-UX. This was expected to occur with the release of the long-delayed 11i v3 version. However, HP had suffered employment reductions in key departments during the economic downturn, and so at the end of 2004 the decision was made to cancel this project. Instead HP would partner with Veritas on a clustering solution.

Since about 2000, the focus of HP-UX has increasing been on enhanced reliability, security, and partitioning. The reliability is provided through clustering technology and package failover on a system outage, as well as redundant hardware, increased quality testing, and error monitoring and correction. Security features have significantly increased with 11i v2, with the addition of kernel-based intrusion detection, strong random number generation, stack buffer overflow protection, security partitioning, role-based access management, and various open source security tools. The system partitioning ranges from hardware partitions to isolated OS virtual partitions, and most recently the Virtual Server Environment (VSE).

As of HP-UX 11i v2 release, the operating system will scale as follows:

Release history

Prior to the release of HP-UX version 11.11, HP used a decimal version numbering scheme with the first number giving the major release and the number following the decimal showing the minor release. With 11.11, HP make a marketing decision to name their releases 11i followed by a v(decimal-number) for the version. The i was intended to indicate the OS is internet-enabled, but the effective result was a dual version-numbering scheme. (The name change was apparently made to respect the World War I Armistice anniversary, which occurs on 11.11 in nations that use decimal dates.)

The first version of HP-UX was 1.0, built about 1983. The OS has undergone a series of updates and enhancements since that time, with the 9.0 release in July, 1992 beginning the 9.x series.

Operating Environments

Operating Environments (OEs) are tested and integrated application bundles designed to work with the operating system and provide the functionality needed for the system's purpose. The following lists the currently available HP-UX 11i v2 OEs:

External links

See also: HP-UX, 1983, 1992, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003