Re: what's parisc execve_wrapper doing in the end?

John David Anglin
2012-10-05T00:00:18Z

On 4-Oct-12, at 10:07 AM, Al Viro wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 09:30:16AM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 8:57 AM, James Bottomley
>> <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
>>>> Unless I'm missing something really subtle, it looks like HPUX
>>>> compat had
>>>> been very noticably broken since at least 2002. Comments?
>>>
>>> I think it probably has. I don't believe there's anyone left with
>>> hpux
>>> binaries actually checking it.
>>
>> Was the HPUX support ever completed?
>>
>> I had HPUX/Linux dual-boot on one of my systems and I was never able
>> to run an HPUX binary correctly.
>>
>> Someone with the time and inclination is all that is missing to
>> cleanup the rotten HPUX bits.
>>
>> There is no need to keep any of it around, that's what version
>> control is for.
>
> FWIW, parisc seems to be the last architecture to keep such thing -
> sparc
> and mips had dropped SunOS/Solaris/IRIX compat, iBCS* is long-dead
> (and hadn't
> been in mainline kernel anyway). Alpha might still be able to run
> some OSF
> binaries, but there the situation is different - no alternative
> syscall
> entry codepath, Linux just uses the same ABI and shares syscall
> numbers
> where possible...

I believe the HP-UX support should be removed.

I think it unlikely that anyone will complete the HP-UX
implementation. For example,
HP-UX has a 64-bit context for 32-bit applications when running a wide
PA2.0
kernel. Linux only has a 32-bit context. As a result, it's not
possible to exploit the 64-bit
registers and instructions in Linux. We also don't have a 64-bit
linux port, so 64-bit HP-UX
support is impossible. There are quite a few other issues.

Dave
--
John David Anglin dave.anglin@bell.net