PA-RISC Linux Project History¶
OLD NEWS¶
Dec 2022¶
Adrian Glaubitz built a new Debian 11 installation media.
Helge submitted many fixes for qemu , e.g. for getsockopt(), msync(), /proc/cpuinfo file, madvise(), strace, sendmsg() and published an initial port of libc for rust.
Dave fixed a closure to function pointer bug in python-libcffi and spent a large amount of time reviewing debian buildd logs, doing give backs, and reporting issues. Furthermore Dave ported libffi to hppa64-hpux which exposed some issues in the 32-bit linux and hpux ports, e.g. 1, 2 and 3.
Linux kernel v6.2 will include a patch which allows parisc to use the same MADV constants for madvise() like other platforms.
Nov 2022¶
Installed new buildd servers “paladin” (a qemu-user emulation running Debian-x86 in VirtualBox on Windows).
Oct 2022¶
After 22 years the power supply in our A500-44 server (which was sponsored by HP) finally broke. It had hosted the ftp site and the mailing lists and was replaced by a x86-VM. Installed new buildd servers “pad” (a qemu-user emulation running Debian-x86 in VirtualBox on Windows) and “atlas” (physical C8000 machine).
Sep 2022¶
Lots of enhancements to the qemu-user emulation. Many of the debian buildd servers run now on x86 hardware which use qemu-user to build packages.
Aug 2022¶
New palo version 2.22 released, with support for booting without palo- or /boot paritions. QEMU version 7.1.0 with many PA-RISC related enhancements and fixes has been released.
Jun 2022¶
Sam James added seccomp support in unit files on HPPA to systemd v252 and worked on elfutils support for HPPA.
John David Anglin helped to fix a glibc bug about broken argv adjustments
Mark Cave-Ayland provided lots of internal cleanups to the hppa PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse emulation in the upcoming QEMU v7.1 to bring the source code up to latest QEMU coding standards.
May 2022¶
Linux kernel v5.18 released, includes vDSO-, CPU hotplug- and improved cache flushing support.
Apr 2022¶
CPU Hotplug support added to Kernel v5.18.
Mar 2022¶
A new set of debian-hppa installation medias for debian unstable provided by Adrian Glaubitz.
16 years after the initial vDSO patch by Randolf Chung, Linux kernel v5.18 will now finally include vDSO support. In addition Kernel v5.18 includes multiple TLB/cache-flush fixes and improvements.
Feb 2022¶
Many Qemu patches were applied to improve HP-UX graphics and mouse, allows up to 16 vCPUs, TOC support and much more. See our Qemu page.
Jan 2022¶
Kernel v5.16 released, with as many parisc enhancements and patches than never before!
Dec 2021¶
Richard Henderson and Helge Deller fix a mis-translation of the stby assembly instruction in Qemu.
Multiple important kernel fixes by Dave Anglin.
Nov 2021¶
Sep 2021¶
Starting with Linux kernel 5.15, you will need to specify “ARCH=parisc64” on the command line when bulding a 64-bit kernel.
Adrian announced that he built new installation medias for debian unstable, ISO images are available here.
Jul 2021¶
The power supply of our old A400 server (“parisc”) broke and got replaced. Machine is now back up again.
Feb 2021¶
Various fixes (e.g. 12) for qemu v5.2 to further improve qemu-user emulation.
Switch to a faster page table locking mechanism with Linux kernel v5.12.
Jan 2021¶
PALO v2.15 released. New parisc Debian build server “pasta”, which runs in a qemu-user parisc chroot environment on a x86-64 virtual machine with 8 CPUs and 16GB RAM. Many thanks to the OSU Open Source Lab who sponsors this VM!
Additionally there is a new parisc Debian build server “paq”. This qemu-user based build server runs on a Synology DS920+ in a x86-64 virtual machine with 3 Intel Celeron J4125 CPUs and 1.5GB RAM.
Dec 2020¶
Reached 12.000 pre-built debian packages.
Oct 2020¶
In Kernel 5.10 O_NONBLOCK was changed to become 000200000 (instead of 000200004). This is a binary ABI change and requires userspace (glibc, dietlibc, systemd) to be recompiled with the new value. The kernel has wrapper functions which provide backwards compatibility.
Aug 2020¶
Roger Sayle fixed a long-standing gcc compiler bug which unnecessarily slowed down compile time.
Jul 2020¶
Helge steps up as new rbootd maintainer.
Dave fixes a long-lasting kernel CPU soft lockup bug.
Many bugfixes 12 and improvements for qemu and preparations for qemu-5.1.0 release. -
Feb 2020¶
The graphics and device patches for PA-RISC have been applied to QEMU git.
Sep 2019¶
PALO v2.12 released. Added kexec support and enhanced ftrace support to Linux kernel v5.4. LASI support (serial, parallel, network, PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse) and Artist graphics w/STI emulation for QEMU and SeaBIOS.
Jul 2019¶
Released PALO version v2.11 with important enhancements by James Bottomley like added ext4-support, IPL overlap with newer ext2/ext3 resize_inode was fixed and the iplboot bootcode loader is now placed inside the disk label.
May 2019¶
Linux kernel 5.2 supports SPARSEMEM instead of DISCONTIGMEM, static branches and per-pagetable spinlocks.
Apr 2019¶
Mar 2019¶
Lots of fixes and improvements in the QEMU CPU- and SCSI emulation code as well as for the SeaBIOS firmware due to efforts of Sven Schnelle. See the PA-RISC Qemu Wiki page for latest updates.
Jan 2019¶
Debian kernel 4.20 will ship built as SMP kernel only (for 32- and 64-bit), which then patches itself at bootup to run faster on uniprocessor machines if it detects only one CPU.
The OSUOSL team was so nice to upgrade the debian buildd servers: “parisc” has now two 300 GB (instead of two 68 GB) and panama three 300 GB (instead of two 18 GB) SCSI discs. Thanks!
Nov 2018¶
A new complete parisc-linux mailing list archive is now available at lore.kernel.org. It even contains the very first parisc-linux mail.
Linux kernel 4.20 includes the “alternative”-feature which enables us to do live-patching of the kernel code at bootup time. With this feature we will be able to build a SMP kernel which is patched at boottime to run faster on a UP system.
Sep 2018¶
Jul 2018¶
Apr 2018¶
Mar 2018¶
New documentation on how to access the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) in rp34x0 and C8000 machines.
Feb 2018¶
Jan 2018¶
New palo bootloader v2.00 released. The callee copies ABI of gcc (on 32-bit hppa) created lots of optimization issues and problems with OpenMP, so Dave committed a patch to switch to the caller copy ABI instead.
First Qemu-related patches to Linux kernel to reduce power consumption on the host have been submitted and the Qemu hardware emulation works fully stable with a booted Linux. Even an emulated 32-CPU PA-RISC SMP machine was running stable.
Dec 2017¶
Development on parisc hardware emulation via qemu is ongoing. Richard Henderson maintains the hppa qemu git tree while Helge Deller works on a parisc IODC and PDC firmware emulation via a SeaBIOS fork. The emulation already boots a Debian install CD, runs through whole kernel initialization code and even runs quite far into the init process.
Sep 2017¶
New Debian-9 installer image is now available at official cdimage places. Many thanks to Adrian Glaubitz!
Kernel 4.14 includes full support for Page Deallocation Table (PDT), the UBSAN checker and kernel self-decompressor.
Aug 2017¶
Kernel 4.13 includes initial Page Deallocation Table (PDT) support to avoid using broken memory by the Linux kernel.
Dave submitted all outstanding patches for hppa to glibc v2.26. Linuxthread support was dropped and switched to the generic nptl support instead. Unwinding was fixed to support pthread cancellation.
Thomas Bogendoerfer fixed the PCI memory bar assignment on Dino/Cujo machines and as such got ATI graphic cards to work on such machines.
New palo bootloader v1.99 released which fixes problems when loading huge kernels, e.g. with kernel UBSAN support enabled.
June 2017¶
Mike Hosken announced a new set of Debian 9 installation medias which are available for download
New palo bootloader v1.98 released which fixes serial console on rp3410 and rp3440 servers.
There are now more than 11.600 pre-built debian unstable packages available.
May 2017¶
Roberto C. Sánchez sponsored a HP rp3410 server with one 800 MHz PA8900 CPU which we upgraded to 5 GB RAM and added a 146 GB hard disc. The server is now reachable as panama.parisc-linux.org and acts as a debian buildd machine. Hosting is sponsored by OSU Open Source Lab. Thanks to all people involved, especially to the great system administrators at OSUOSL (Samarendra Hedaoo and Justin Dugger).
Apr 2017¶
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz and James Clarke made the debian-installer available in debian-ports repositories
Feb 2017¶
Alan Modra and Dave Anglin fix pie support on hppa and add -z relro support to binutils
Jan 2017¶
New Debian-9 installation CDs by Mike Hosken. Reached more than 11.500 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Dec 2016¶
Reached more than 11.400 pre-built debian unstable packages. John David Anglin and John Paul Adrian Glaubitz fix the Firefox webbrowser with help of Michael Karcher. The debian buildd servers switched to a unified automated build setup by James Clarke. Status of the buildds can be seen at https://monitor.jrtc27.com/
Nov 2016¶
Richard Henderson announced initial work on a user-only target of hppa to QEMU. The website and domain http://pateam.org has expired and all content is now archived at http://pateam.parisc-linux.org/. Thanks to Thibaut Varene for his work on pateam.org.
Oct 2016¶
Sep 2016¶
Reached more than 11.300 pre-built debian unstable packages. Linux Kernel 4.7 now includes a high-resolution timer based on the cr16 clocksource. Debian perl transition finished. Debian Linux Kernel 4.7.5 available.
Aug 2016¶
Debian transitions to gcc-6 and boost1.61, Debian on hppa changes the default mpi implementation from mpich to openmpi
Jul 2016¶
Reached more than 11.200 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Jun 2016¶
Reached more than 11.100 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Apr 2016¶
Linux kernel 4.7 got improved kernel ftrace support, kernel regset support and a native high-resolution clock/timing support. Additional debian buildd make server added (savaria.parisc-linux.org).
Mar 2016¶
Feb 2016¶
We now have more than 11.000 pre-built debian unstable packages. Many bugs in kernel and userspace were fixed.
Jan 2016¶
Reached more than 10.900 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Dec 2015¶
Oct 2015¶
Sep 2015¶
We have an additional Debian buildd server (phantom.parisc-linux.org with 4 x 1 GHz PA8900 CPUs, 12 GB RAM, 120 GB SSD) online. Dave fixed 64bit CAS LWS so that we will get 64bit gcc atomic builtins. Helge fixed boot problems because of early serial port irqs on C8000 with PA8900 CPUs.
Aug 2015¶
One of our buildd servers (hpviz) died. Debian-ports archive is now integrated with Debian buildd service again.
Jul 2015¶
Reached more than 10.700 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Jun 2015¶
Reached more than 10.600 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Apr 2015¶
Reached more than 10.520 pre-built debian unstable packages which is just around 60 packages less than the leading debian-ports architectures alpha and ppc64.
Mar 2015¶
Installation numbers of hppa debian machines grow to 25 in the Debian Popularity Contest.
Feb 2015¶
DEBIAN 8.0 (jessie) Installer images and Installation instructions now available.
Jan 2015¶
Compared to other architectures on debian-ports, the PA-RISC / HPPA architecture now has the most number of packages up-to-date: http://buildd.debian-ports.org/stats/graph2-week-big.png
Dec 2014¶
Full range of gcc atomic builtins committed into gcc-4.9 which helped us to build packages which were not posible before (in total we are now at 10.400 prebuilt debian packages).
Nov 2014¶
We now fully support systemd with debian packages glibc-2.19-13 and linux-image-3.16.0-4 (kernel 3.16.7).
The contents of the parisc-linux kernel mailinglist were imported into gmane.org archive
Oct 2014¶
Reached 10.300 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Sep 2014¶
Browsers will now automatically be transferred to this Wiki if one visits http://www.parisc-linux.org.
We now have more than 10.200 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Aug 2014¶
We now have more than 10.100 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Helge Deller now owns and maintains the parisc-linux domain.
Jul 2014¶
Reached more than 10.000 pre-built debian unstable packages.
Jun 2014¶
The A500-44 is up and running as additional debian buildd server at http://parisc.osuosl.org.
Kernel 3.15 is out.
Added a very fast 4-way 1GHz C8000 machine with 250GB SATA SSD drive as additional Debian buildd server (sibaris.parisc-linux.org), machine and hosting sponsored by Bálint Sándor Németh.
May 2014¶
More than 9900 debian packages built.
Kernel 3.15 will be the most best kernel ever.
The A500 (mkhppa3) buildd which was sponsored and hosted by ESIEE sadly died.
Apr 2014¶
The PARISC boot loader palo is back in debian unstable.
More than 9750 debian packages built.
Mar 2014¶
The A500-44 which hosted our main webpage is being moved to OSUOSL.org.
More than 9500 debian packages built.
Feb 2014¶
The new parisc Wiki is now at http://parisc.wiki.kernel.org. Contents of the old Wiki at wiki.parisc-linux.org was moved and the webpage redirects here.
Jan 2014¶
Updated Debian unstable install instructions.
More than 8000 newly built native Debian packages available.
Dec 2013¶
The servers hpviz and rio including hosting are sponsored by Dave Land (http://landcomp.net).
Stable Debian kernel 3.12 available.
Aug 2013¶
Linux kernel 3.11 supports C8000 workstation (SMP, serial port, FireGL card, BMC, …)
Apr 2013¶
Website updated, added Debian ports installation instructions and updated TODO list.
Mar 2013¶
Debian 7.0 (wheezy) without HPPA.
Feb 2013¶
Many PA-RISC Linux kernel patches have been integrated into Kernel 3.8. Stability will improve even further with kernel 3.9.
Feb 2012¶
Website is back up! Work continues on the debian-ports support for HPPA.
Sep 2010¶
HPPA dropped as an official release architecture for squeeze.
Sep 2009¶
NPTL transition is ready, thanks to the efforts of Carlos!
Feb 2009¶
Debian 5.0!
Apr 2007¶
Debian 4.0!
Jul 2006¶
James fixes (mostly) parisc-linux on PA8800! w00t!
Mar 2006¶
Fixed stifb on 64-bit machines. X now works with a 64-bit kernel!
Dec 2005¶
Fixed framebuffer console on 32bit HCRX graphic cards
Dec 2005¶
PCMCIA support added (e.g. used in Tadpole PA-RISC laptops)
Jun 2005¶
Debian 3.1!
Mar 2005¶
The parisc-linux patch set is less than 200K for the first time ever! Thanks to willy for doing such a great job pushing patches upstream!
Jun 2004¶
Support for PA8800/zx1 committed!
PROJECT HISTORY¶
December 1, 2000¶
The PA-RISC web site has moved to www.parisc-linux.org domain. Besides the appearance of the Linuxcare penguin Lux (in gear suitable for working on the PA-RISC engine), the PA-RISC site is fresh with a content update, face lift and co-branding with HP.
December 15, 1999¶
The Puffin Group and Linuxcare join forces, providing us all with additional resources and backing to dedicate to the porting effort. In fact, we are now working even more closely with Hewlett-Packard. While we were in California getting all the details sorted out, a number of people posted to the mailing list with concerns that the project was dead. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Martin Fink from HP posted the following message to help clear up the misunderstanding: http://puffin.external.hp.com/mailing-lists/parisc-linux/1999/12-Dec/0073.html.
November 19, 1999¶
Hewlett-Packard, in cooperation with The Puffin Group, has released the source code to their SOM linker product.
August 16, 1999¶
The source code repository is now cross-referenced online.
July 6, 1999¶
Philipp Rumpf gets interruptions working, you can now enter them and the system returns from them.
June 26-27, 1999¶
Matthew Wilcox and Thomas Bogendoerfer in cooperation with HP demonstrate the booting Linux kernel at LinuxTag ‘99 in Kaiserslautern, Germany.
June 25, 1999¶
Helge Deller boots the first time Linux on a 715/64 PA-RISC machine which promptly dies after displaying kernel version information. Much celebration.
May 19-24, 1999¶
The Puffin Group hosts Bird of Feather session at Linux Expo, and participates in HP’s booth. Tremendous interest and support shown for the project.
May 15, 1999¶
HP, through the The Puffin Group, distributes A180C machines to developers.
March 9, 1999¶
HP releases first round of documentation on the basic boot up sequence and PDC interfaces. See the [/documentation/index.html Documentation] section on this page.
March 1999¶
Hewlett-Packard Formally Sponsors Project - At Linux World Expo on March 1st, HP officially announces its support and endorsement of the PARISC Linux project. They promised to provide marketing and technical resources to the project, and talks began towards releasing documentation and hardware through The Puffin Group.
HP, in conjunction with The Puffin Group, releases documents - On March 9th, HP releases documentation regarding the basic bootup sequence and PDC interfaces. See the [/documentation/index.html Documentation] section.
February 1999¶
Establishing the Framework - Christopher Beard sets up the web pages and mailing lists, with Phil Schwan configuring the CVS repository. The web pages are then added to several Linux development sites, and there is a noticable increase in interest in the project.
The Cross-Compiler - Paul Lahaie joins the project, working with Alex deVries on the cross-compiler, based on egcs 1.1.1 and the mkLinux patches.
Boot Loader - Jason Eckhardt releases the first test boot image for bootstrapping, Alex packages the rpmboot package, so now you can boot something.
January 1999¶
Getting Machines into the Hands of Developers - Neil Van Dyke offers up a machine on loan to the project, with Michael Fratoni of Boston assisting with shipping arrangements.
Martin Petersen joins the development team, with limited access to several systems.
Work continues on getting machines to people who need them, as well as getting the proper adapters for monitors and serial consoles.
October 1998¶
The PARISC Linux Project Officially Begins - Conceived by Christopher Beard and Alex deVries over lunch at the Atlanta Linux Showcase, with Travis Melhiser offering up a machine to be used for development.
The Puffin Group Formally Sponsors the Project - The Puffin Group, a Linux development and consulting firm, formally sponsors the project providing server space and programming resources.