(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High-Tech News Site in Japanese)
|
|
| Hewlett-Packard, NEC to Develop IA-64-Enabled UNIX OS
|
|
September 18, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Hewlett-Packard Co. and NEC Corp. agreed
to jointly develop a new version of HP-UX, HP's version of UNIX, for
Intel Corp.'s "Merced" 64-bit microprocessor.
|
Merced is due to be commercialized in late 2000.
NEC will transport part of the operating system kernel, with support
from HP.
The new HP-UX for Merced has been under joint development by HP and other
three companies: Santa Cruz Operation Inc., NEC and Hitachi Ltd.
IA-64, the instruction set for Merced, conforms to specifications called
PlayDoh (HPL-PD) developed by an R&D; division of HP. That makes the
new version HP-UX a strong candidate to run on Merced-based systems,
according to concerned parties.
The above four companies currently are using servers with HP's PA-8000
to develop the new version of HP-UX. This requires a transporting process
to actually run the HP UNIX being developed at present on a Merced-based
system in future. HP will leave the transporting work to NEC.
With the move, NEC reportedly wants to preemptively master know-how and
technology yet to be announced by Intel and HP for managing and operating
codes in the Merced operating system.
However it is not clear whether NEC will succeed in acquiring this advanced
know-how based on the current agreement with HP.
Their agreement for the porting work covers mainly a memory management
function, a task scheduling function and the file system. They are all
related to basic functions provided in the kernel portion of the operating
system, which means they are not strongly dependent on a specific instruction-set
architecture.
In addition, it is highly likely that some modification will be required
after the actual porting is conducted. The transporting itself is based
on a simulator provided by HP and Intel.
More information is in English at: http://www.nec.co.jp/english/today/newsrel/9809/1001.html
(BizTech News Dept.)
|
|
|
