Linux on PA-RISC documentation

Dave fixed another long-standing glibc floating-point bug: Miscompilation of sysdeps/ieee754/dbl-64/s_fma.c

The PA-RISC project participates in the GSOC 2025: Implement LASI network or SCSI controller in qemu

A new Debian installation CD-ROM image is available. Please read HPPA specific installation notes.

Maintenance update of palo version 2.26 released.

Dave fixed a glibc bug: pthread_attr_getstacksize/pthread_attr_getstack return incorrect main stack size

Various updates to the debian-installer

Qemu v9.2.0 was released. Includes some important fixes and a new SeaBIOS-hppa v17 firmware.

Dave committed a fix to glibc which implements vfork() by calling the kernel vfork syscall instead of emulating it via the clone() syscall. There is quite some difference like when which process continues. This showed up in the testcases of the strace package.

Helge authored and Dave committed a glibc cacheflush() syscall wrapper.

Michael Lorenz reported that he has developed graphics drivers for Visualize EG, HCRX and Visualize FX as well as an Xorg framebuffer driver for NetBSD.

Paul Weissmann added a section about “PA-RISC Emulation QEMU” to the openpa.net website.

The PA-RISC Wiki has been replaced by a ReadTheDocs static website and is now hosted at https://parisc.docs.kernel.org. The website source code is available at https://github.com/hdeller/parisc-website

Dave Anglin works on switching gcc to use LRA

Dmitry Sibirtsev added support for the HPPA/PA-RISC architecture to the Capstone disassembly/disassembler framework. Capstone is used by by QEMU and other projects.

Qemu v9.1.0 released. Needs at least one patch for system-mode and one patch for user-mode to run stable with 64-bit CPUs.

Some patches for Linux kernel to fix 64-bit userspace issues.

The Debian 64-bit time_t transition has finished and stability of PA-Linux has improved greatly. Important next milestones will be to port rust to hppa, and maybe to add a LLVM backend for parisc.

Dave Anglin contributed a patch which prevents the random segfaults we faced on PA8800 and PA8900 CPU machines. It is included in kernel 6.6.35, 6.9.6, and 6.10.0 (and higher).

Work has started to add clock_gettime() syscalls in kernel vDSO.

The Debian 64-bit time_t transition is going very well. Upgrades were broken until now, but since end of april 2024 it’s possible again to upgrade most existing debian hppa installations to the new binaries from the debian-ports archive. Since now 64-bit time_t is enabled by default, and since the LFS64 filesystem calls are enabled by default as well, we expect much lesss problems running debian hppa.

Qemu 9.0 was released. Note that the 64-bit hppa emulation is still incomplete and may work with Linux guests only.

Improving 64-bit CPU emulation in Qemu, e.g. with CPU fixes from Richard and HP-UX 11 64-bit support fixes from Sven.

The Offline_Diagnostic_Environment_(ODE) CD-ROM is helpful to verify quality of Qemu CPU emulation.

Debian 64-bit time transition is ongoing. Lots of hppa packages have to be bootstrapped again.

Initial rust libc support for hppa was added (and temporarily removed again).

Upcoming Qemu v8.2 will support booting a 64-bit Linux kernel.

Kernel 6.6 and Qemu 8.2 with SeaBIOS-hppa v9 supports Block-TLBs (BTLB) on 32-bit kernels.

Kernel 6.6 includes native eBPF JIT compiler for 32- and 64-bit kernels.

Dave fixed glibc v2.38 to prevent ``unaligned access to 0xf7ebadcd at ip 0xf5f7e307` syslog warnings <https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30750>`__

Development to support 64-bit PA-RISC CPU emulation and Astro/Elroy PCI-Bridge emulated device in QEMU started. Goal is to (hopefully) allow booting a 64-bit Linux kernel and HP/UX 11 with 64-bit support in QEMU.

The T2 System Development Environment Linux distribution added support for 32- and 64-bit PA-RISC.

Qemu 8.1.0 released.

Found a 10-year old bug (since kernel 3.11) which affected 32-bit parisc kernels.

Many kernel bugs fixed in aio, …

Qemu 8.0.3 released with many parisc fixes (SMP CPU fixes, graphics fixes).

Work started to implement native eBPF for Linux kernel.

palo version 2.24 released.

STI text console support on 64-bit machines, e.g. this allows using all original HP graphics cards in text-mode on C8000 workstations.

Fix palo to speed up printing the IPL menu on C8000 workstations.

Debian-12 (Bookworm) preparations, with more than 13,000 pre-built packages.

Progress on an upcoming Visualize-FX5 fbdev graphics driver.

More than 12,900 pre-built Debian packages available.

Availability of a new HP J6700 dual-core debian porterbox parisc.debian.net, sponsored by Cypress Technology Inc. This machines was upgraded to 8 GB RAM and 2 x 300GB discs with parts of the former “parisc” HP A500-44 server.

See PA-RISC_Linux_Project_History for older news.