HP-UX
Overview
HP-UX is a proprietary Unix operating system developed and manufactured by Hewlett-Packard (HP). It is based on the UNIX System V and has significant enhancements and features from the BSD variant of Unix. HP-UX was first released in 1984 and has been continually updated and improved over the years, making it one of the longest-lived commercial Unix variants in existence.
Architecture
HP-UX was originally designed to run on HP's proprietary PA-RISC microprocessor architecture. However, with the advent of Itanium, a 64-bit microprocessor developed jointly by HP and Intel, HP-UX was ported to this new architecture. This transition was significant as it allowed HP-UX to take advantage of the increased processing power and memory addressing capabilities of the Itanium architecture.
Features
HP-UX includes a number of features that distinguish it from other Unix variants. These include:
- Logical Volume Manager (LVM): This allows for flexible disk storage management, enabling system administrators to resize file systems on the fly and perform other disk management tasks without system downtime.
- Veritas File System (VxFS): This is a high-performance journaling file system that provides quick recovery in the event of a system crash.
- HP Serviceguard: This is a high-availability clustering solution that protects against system and application failures.
- HP-UX Containers: This is a virtualization technology that allows multiple isolated HP-UX environments to run on a single system.
Performance
HP-UX is renowned for its robustness and performance. It is designed to run mission-critical applications and is widely used in industries such as finance, telecommunications, and manufacturing where system uptime and performance are paramount. HP-UX's performance can be attributed to its efficient kernel design, its support for symmetric multiprocessing, and its advanced I/O subsystem.
Compatibility
HP-UX maintains a high degree of compatibility with other Unix systems through its compliance with the Single UNIX Specification, which is a set of standards that define the features and behavior of a Unix system. This ensures that software written for other Unix systems can be ported to HP-UX with minimal modifications.
Future
Despite the declining popularity of Unix in favor of Linux, HP continues to support and develop HP-UX. The latest version, HP-UX 11i v3, was released in 2007 and continues to receive updates. HP has committed to supporting HP-UX until at least 2025.