Linux on the PA-RISC processor

Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC processor is one of the few remaining mainstream processors without Linux support. This talk discusses the progress of the port to date including a brief rundown of the available hardware and a description of the basic architecture.

We will detail kernel changes required for the PA-RISC CPU, particularly those required for SMP support and PCI cards. Linux/PA-RISC includes an HP/UX emulation layer and this will also be discussed. Most of the work involved in porting to a new architecture is supporting all the devices that are available and PA-RISC is no exception in this area. Even though drivers were available for many of the chips used, work was still required to get them to work.

The pre-existing HP/UX support in GCC and Binutils was for the 32-bit SOM format. The changes to the toolchain which were required to support ELF will be covered. The GNU C Library also had to be ported to the PA-RISC processor.

Matthew Wilcox

Matthew Wilcox has been involved with Free Software and Linux for many years and is a hacker in C, Java, and assembler. He has contributed to GNU binutils, GNU texinfo, the Linux kernel, glibc, and a number of other Open Source projects, including an NFS server and an ext2 file-system reader. Matthew is currently working on the project to port Linux to Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC line of computers.

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