HP-UX 9.x and 10.20 on QEMU w/Apps!

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(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Last year I wrote about installing HP-UX 11.11 on QEMU. Time to go back in time!

HP-UX 10.20 has run in QEMU for a while (see openpa.net), but slow and on one CPU. 9.05 and 9.07 did not run at all, until last week when Helge Deller and Keith Monahan got 9.05 booting on the 715. I picked it up from there in LEMU, my QEMU fork, and fixed whatever was still broken:

  • Idle CPU! HP-UX never halts the CPU, its idle loop just spins. LEMU detects it and puts the vCPU to sleep. 9.05 went from 93% of a host core to 2%, 10.20 with 4 CPUs from 400% to 3%.
  • 4 CPUs on 10.20, each on its own host core. Fork and exec were 4x slower on 4 CPUs than on 1, fixed.
  • No more -d nochain from the 11.11 post, about 3x faster.
  • VUE login often never came up on a fast host: the X server divided by zero in its timer calibration. Paced now.
  • Graphics artifacts: FrameMaker text was unreadable, Battalion had wrong colours and streaks, closed windows left bits of their frames behind, the cursor leaked pixels to the left edge, PEX crashed QEMU.
  • FPU: Netscape hung at start, fmpyadd gave wrong results, 10.20 panicked on 4 CPUs.
  • SoftPC died with “Internal error (Signal 04)”, now boots MS-DOS with VGA graphics.
  • SCSI and LAN on the 715 fixed for 9.x, and snapshots work.

Behold! HP-UX 9.05 with HP VUE 3.0 on an emulated HP 9000/715:

HP-UX 9.05 on an emulated HP 9000/715: FrameMaker 5.1.1 and Netscape Communicator 4.04 on HP VUE
FrameMaker 5.1.1 and Netscape 4.04

Specs: HP 9000/715, PA-7100LC, 128MB RAM, Artist 1280x1024, NCR710 SCSI, i82596 LAN

9.07 works too:

SimCity on HP-UX 9.07, San Francisco earthquake
SimCity on 9.07

And HP-UX 10.20 on an emulated HP B160L with 4 CPUs:

HP-UX 10.20 on an emulated HP B160L: ioscan shows 4 processors, sar shows all 4 CPUs at 100%
4 CPUs, all busy

Specs: HP B160L, 4 x PA-7300LC, 512MB RAM, Artist 1280x1024, Tulip LAN

Let’s look at some cool apps! First HP-UX 9.05:

Battalion game title screen on HP-UX 9.05
Battalion, now in the right colours
Maelstrom game title screen on HP-UX 9.05
Maelstrom
Macintosh Application Environment 3.0 running Mac OS 7.5.3 on HP-UX 9.05
MAE 3.0, Mac OS 7.5 on HP-UX!
Wabi 2.2 running Windows 3.11 Program Manager on HP-UX 9.05
Wabi 2.2
NCSA X Mosaic 2.7b4 on HP-UX 9.05
NCSA Mosaic 2.7b4
WordPerfect 6.0 for UNIX on HP-UX 9.05
WordPerfect 6.0
CorelDRAW 3.5 for UNIX on HP-UX 9.05
CorelDRAW 3.5

And HP-UX 10.20:

Lotus Notes R4 on HP-UX 10.20
Lotus Notes R4
FrameMaker 6.0 on HP-UX 10.20
FrameMaker 6.0
Netscape Navigator Gold 3.01 on HP-UX 10.20
Netscape Navigator Gold 3.01
SoftWindows 2.0 running Windows 3.11 on HP-UX 10.20
SoftWindows 2.0 with Windows 3.11
QBasic Gorillas in SoftPC 3.1 on HP-UX 10.20
Gorillas in SoftPC 3.1
SAM System Administration Manager on HP-UX 10.20
SAM
HP SoftBench with its XEmacs editor on HP-UX 10.20
SoftBench
NEdit with syntax highlighted C on HP-UX 10.20
NEdit

Ready to run, portable images for macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux (x86_64, aarch64) and Windows x64. Unpack and run run.sh or run.cmd. Login root, no password on 9.x, root / root on 10.20.

Gory details: https://github.com/tenox7/lemu/tree/master/machines/hppa

Have Fun with Virtualization!

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