HPPA Installation on HP Visualize C3700 Workstation

kaplan71 · n00b Joined: 05 Nov 2004 Posts: 22

Hi there --

I am going through the motions of installing Gentoo on a Visualize C3700 workstation. I have the choice of two stage 3 tarballs: hppa-1.1 and hppa-2.0.
My question is, what is the difference between the two tarballs, and is there a particular one to install on the system? Thanks.

nixnut · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 6:23 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo on Alternative Architectures.
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tel · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Aug 2006 Posts: 112

Not that this is really an answer, but I installed hppa-2.0 on my Visualize 3600, only because it seemed "newer." Not very scientific, I know.

Still, it works fine.

tel · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Aug 2006 Posts: 112

Ok, one more thing. As I review the archives, others smarter than I note that hppa2.0 is only for PA8000 and above.

HPRichard · Posted: Tue Oct 31, 2006 10:15 pm Post subject:

The difference between the hppa1.1 and hppa2.0 tarballs are the processor instructions used.

PA-RISC 1.1 is (with several revisions ranging from 1.1a to 1.1e) the ISA Instruction Set Architecture) of the older 32bit CPUs (PA7000, PA7100, PA7150, PA7100LC, PA7200 and PA7300LC), while PA-RISC 2.0 is the ISA of the newer 64bit CPUs (PA8000 and up).

Linux does not support a 64bit userland on PA-RISC - so the difference between the two stage3 tarballs is not that thing.
The hppa1.1 stage3 tarball is compiled with options that generate code runnable on any PA-RISC CPU not regarding whether it's 1.1 or 2.0, as well as the revisions of 1.1 (which added additional instructions) don't matter.
The hppa2.0 stage3 tarball is compiled in 32bit mode, but uses instructions that are not available on (all) 1.1 revisiond but are guaranteed to exist on 2.0 CPUs.

It might help to compare PA-RISC 1.1 and PA-RISC 2.0 to i386 and x86_64 in general and with i386 and pentium4 for Linux userland.