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HDMI 2.2 will require new “Ultra96” cables, whenever we have 8K TVs and content

We’ve all had a good seven years to figure out why our interconnected devices refused to work properly with the HDMI 2.1 specification. The HDMI Forum announced at CES today that it’s time to start considering new headaches. HDMI 2.2 will require new cables for full compatibility, but it has the same physical connectors. Tiny QR codes are suggested to help with that, however.

The new specification is named HDMI 2.2, but compatible cables will carry an “Ultra96” marker to indicate that they can carry 96GBps, double the 48 of HDMI 2.1b. The Forum anticipates this will result in higher resolutions and refresh rates and a “next-gen HDMI Fixed Rate Link.” The Forum cited “AR/VR/MR, spatial reality, and light field displays” as benefiting from increased bandwidth, along with medical imaging and machine vision.

↫ Kevin Purdey at Ars Technica

I’m sure this will not pose any problems whatsoever, and that no shady no-name manufacturers will abuse this situation at all. DisplayPort is the better standard and connector anyway.

No, I will not be taking questions.

NESFab: a new programming language for creating NES games

NESFab is a new programming language for creating NES games. Designed with 8-bit limitations in mind, the language is more ergonomic to use than C, while also producing faster assembly code. It’s easy to get started with, and has a useful set of libraries for making your first — or hundredth — NES game.

↫ NESFab website

NESFab has some smart features developers of NES games will certainly appreciate, most notably automatic bank switching. Instead of doing this manually, but NESFab will automatically carve your code and data up into banks to be switched in and out of memory when needed. There’s also an optional map editor, which makes it very easy to create additional levels for your game. All in all, a very cool project I hadn’t heard of, which also claims to perform better than other compilers.

If you’ve ever considered making an NES game, NESFab might be a tool to consider.

OpoLua: a compiled-OPL interpreter for iOS written in Lua

An OPO (compiled OPL) interpreter written in Lua and Swift, based on the Psion Series 5 era format (ie ER5, prior to the Quartz 6.x changes). It lets you run Psion 5 programs written in OPL on any iOS device, subject to the limitations described below.

↫ OpoLua GitHub page

If you’re pining for that Psion Series 5, but don’t want to deal with the hassle of owning and maintaining a real one – here’s a solution if you’re an iOS users. Incredibly neat, but with one limitation: only pure OPL programs work. Any program that also has native ARM code will not work.

Dell rebrands its entire product line: XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, etc. are going away

Dell has announced it’s rebranding literally its entire product line, so mainstays like XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron are going away. They’re replacing all of these old brands with Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, and within each of these, there will be three tiers: Base, Plus, and Premium. Of course, the reason is “AI”.

The AI PC market is quickly evolving. Silicon innovation is at its strongest and everyone from IT decision makers to professionals and everyday users are looking at on-device AI to help drive productivity and creativity. To make finding the right AI PC easy for customers, we’ve introduced three simple product categories to focus on core customer needs – Dell (designed for play, school and work), Dell Pro (designed for professional-grade productivity) and Dell Pro Max (designed for maximum performance). 

We’ve also made it easy to distinguish products within each of the new product categories. We have a consistent approach to tiering that lets customers pinpoint the exact device for their specific needs. Above and beyond the starting point (Base), there’s a Plus tier that offers the most scalable performance and a Premium tier that delivers the ultimate in mobility and design.

↫ Kevin Terwilliger on Dell’s blog

Setting aside the nonsensical reasoning behind the rebrand, I do actually kind of dig the simplicity here. This is a simple, straightforward set of brand names and tiers that pretty much anyone can understand. That being said, the issue with Dell in particular is that once you go to their website to actually buy one of their machines, the clarity abruptly ends and it gets confusing fast. I hope these new brand names and tiers will untangle some of that mess to make it easier to find what you need, but I’m skeptical.

My XPS 13 from 2017 is really starting to show its age, and considering how happy I’ve been with it over the years its current Dell equivalent would be a top contender (assuming I had the finances to do so). I wonder if the Linux support on current Dell laptops has improved since my XPS 13 was new?

Microsoft’s tone-deaf advice to Windows 10 users: just buy a new PC, you’re all rich, right?

Over 60% of Windows users are still using Windows 10, with only about 35% or so – and falling! – of them opting to use Windows 11. As we’ve talked about many times before, this is a major issue going into 2025, since Windows 10’s support will end in October of this year, meaning hundreds of millions of people all over the world will suddenly be running an operating system that will no longer receive security updates. Most of those people don’t want to, or cannot, upgrade to Windows 11, meaning Microsoft is leaving 60% of its Windows customer base out to dry.

I’m sure this will go down just fine with regulators and governments the world over.

Microsoft has tried everything, and it’s clear desperation is setting in, because the company just declared 2025 “The year of the Windows 11 PC refresh”, stating that Windows 11 is the best way to get all the “AI” stuff people are clearly clamoring for.

All of the innovation arriving on new Windows 11 PCs is coming at an important time. We recently confirmed that after providing 10 years of updates and support, Windows 10 will reach the end of its lifecycle on Oct. 14, 2025. After this date, Windows 10 PCs will no longer receive security or feature updates, and our focus is on helping customers stay protected by moving to modern new PCs running Windows 11. Whether the current PC needs a refresh, or it has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-backed protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC.

↫ Some overpaid executive at Microsoft

What makes this so incredibly aggravating and deeply tone-deaf is that for most of the people affected by this, “upgrading” to Windows 11 simply isn’t a realistic option. Their current PC is most likely performing and working just fine, but the steep and strict hardware requirements prohibit them from installing Windows 11. Buying an entirely new PC is often not only not needed from a performance perspective, but for many, many people also simply unaffordable. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not exactly going great, financially, for a lot of people out there, and even in the US alone, 70-80% of people live paycheck-to-paycheck, and they’re certainly not going to be able to just “move forward with a new Windows 11 PC” for nebulous and often regressive “benefits” like “AI”.

The fact that Microsoft seems to think all of those hundreds of millions of people not only want to buy a new PC to get “AI” features, but that they also can afford it like it’s no big deal, shows some real lack of connective tissue between the halls of Microsoft’s headquarters and the wider world. Microsoft’s utter lack of a grasp on the financial realities of so many individuals and families today is shocking, at best, and downright offensive, at worst.

I guess if you live in a world where you can casually bribe a president-elect for one million dollars, buying a new computer feels like buying a bag of potatoes.

Why Half-Life 3 speculation is reaching a fever pitch again

The more than two decades since Half-Life 2‘s release have been filled with plenty of rumors and hints about Half-Life 3, ranging from the officialish to the thin to the downright misleading. As we head into 2025, though, we’re approaching something close to a critical mass of rumors and leaks suggesting that Half-Life 3 is really in the works this time, and could be officially announced in the coming months.

↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica

We should all be skeptical of anything related to Half-Life 3, but there’s no denying something’s buzzing. The one reason why I personally think a Half-Life 3 might be happening is the imminent launch of SteamOS for generic PCs, possibly accompanied by prebuilt SteamOS PCs and consoles and third-party Steam Decks. It makes perfect sense for Valve to have such a launch accompanied by the release of Half-Life 3, similar to how Half-Life 2 was accompanied by the launch of Steam.

We’ll have to wait and see. It will be hard to fulfill all the crazy expectations, though.

One dog v. the Windows 3.1 graphics stack

I’d like to write a full-fledged blog post about these adventures at some point, but for now I’m going to focus on one particular side quest: getting acceptable video output out of the 1000H when it’s running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.

By default, Windows 3.x renders using the standard “lowest common denominator” of video: VGA 640×480 at 16 colours. Unfortunately this looks awful on the Eee PC’s beautiful 1024×600 screen, and it’s not even the same aspect ratio.

But how can we do better?

↫ Ash Wolf

If you ever wanted to know how display drivers work in Windows 3.x, here’s your chance. This definitely falls into the category of light reading for the weekend.

The Mac OS X dock turns 25

James Thomson, developer of, originally, DragThing and now PCalc, also happens to be the developer of the very first publicly shown version of the Mac OS dock. Now that it was shown to the world by Steve Jobs exactly 25 years ago, he reminisces about what it was like to create such an iconic piece of software history.

The new Finder (codename “Millennium”) was at this point being written on Mac OS 9, because Mac OS X wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders quite yet. The filesystem wasn’t working well, which is not super helpful when you are trying to write a user interface on top of it. The Dock was part of the Finder then, and could lean on all the high level C++ interfaces for dealing with disks and files that the rest of the team was working on. So, I started on Mac OS 9, working away in Metrowerks Codewarrior. The Finder was a Carbon app, so we could actually make quite a bit of early progress on 9, before the OS was ready for us. I vividly remember the first time we got the code running on Mac OS X.

↫ James Thomson

I especially like the story about how Steve Jobs really demanded Thomson live in Cupertino in order to work on the dock, instead of remaining remote in Ireland. Thomson and his wife decided not to move to the United States, so he figured he’d lose his assignment, or maybe even his job altogether. Instead, his managers told him something along the lines of “don’t worry, we’ll just tell Steve you moved”. What followed were a lot of back-and-forth flights between Ireland and California, and Thomson’s colleagues telling Steve all sorts of lies and cover stories for whenever he was in Ireland and Steve noticed.

Absolutely wild.

The dock is one of those things from my years using Mac OS X – between roughly 2003 and 2009 or so – that has stuck around with me ever since. To this day, I have a dock at the bottom of my screen that looks and works eerily similar to the Mac OS X dock, and I doubt that’s going to change any time soon. It suits my way of using my computer incredibly well, and it’s the first thing I set up on any new installation I perform (I use Fedora KDE).

NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 will supposedly have a monstrous 575W TDP

The RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 are receiving their final updates. According to two highly reliable leakers, the RTX 5090 is officially a 575W TDP model, confirming that the new SKU requires significantly more power than its predecessor, the RTX 4090 with TDP of 450W.

According to Kopite, there has also been an update to the RTX 5080 specifications. While the card was long rumored to have a 400W TDP, the final figure is now set at 360W. This change is likely because NVIDIA has confirmed the TDP, as opposed to earlier TGP figures that are higher and represent the maximum power limit required by NVIDIA’s specifications for board partners.

↫ WhyCry at VideoCardz.com

These kinds of batshit insane GPU power power requirements are eventually going to run into the limits of the kind of airflow an ATX case can provide. We’re still putting the airflow stream of GPUs (bottom to top) perpendicular to the airflow through the case (front to back) like it’s 1987, and you’d think at least someone would be thinking about addressing this – especially when a GPU is casually dumping this much heat into the constrained space within a computer case.

I don’t want more glass and gamer lights. I want case makers to hire at least one proper fluid dynamics engineer.

Windows 2: Final Fantasy of operating systems

It is common knowledge that Final Fantasy could have been the last game in the series. It is far less known that Windows 2, released around the same time, could too have been the last. If anything, things were more certain: even Microsoft believed that Windows 2 would be the last.

The miracle of overwhelming commercial success brought incredible attention to Windows. The retro community and computer historians generally seem to be interested in the legendary origins of the system (how it all began) or in its turnabout Windows 3.0 release (what did they do right?).

This story instead will be about the underdog of Windows, version 2. To understand where it all went wrong, we must start looking at events that happened even before Microsoft was founded. By necessity, I will talk a lot about the origins of Windows, too. Instead of following interpersonal/corporate drama, I will try to focus on the technical aspects of Windows and its competitors, as well as the technological limitations of the computers around the time. Some details are so convoluted and obscure that even multiple Microsoft sources, including Raymond Chen, are wrong about essential technical details. It is going to be quite a journey, and it might seem a bit random, but I promise that eventually, it all will start making sense.

↫ Nina Kalinina

I’m not going to waste your previous time with my stupid babbling when you could instead spend it reading this amazingly detailed, lovingly crafted, beautifully illustrated, and deeply in-depth article by Nina Kalinina about the history, development, and importance of Windows 2. She’s delivered something special here, and it’s a joy to read and stare at the screenshots from beginning to end. Don’t forget to click on the little expander triangles for a ton of in-depth technical stuff and even more background information.

AROS centimeters closer to 64bit

We’ve just entered the new year, and that means we’re going to see some overviews about what the past year has brought. Today we’re looking at AROS, as AROS News – great name, very classy, you’ve got good taste, don’t change it – summarised AROS’ 2024, and it’s been a good year for the project. We don’t hear a lot about AROS-proper, as the various AROS distributions are a more optimal way of getting to know the operating system and the project’s communication hasn’t always been great, but that doesn’t mean they’ve been sitting still.

Perhaps the most surprising amount of progress in 2024 was made in the move from 32bit to 64bit AROS.

Deadwood also released a 64-bit version of the system (ABIv11) in a Linux hosted version (ABIv11 20241102-1) and AxRuntime version 41.12, which promises a complete switch to 64-bit in the near future. He has also developed a prototype emulator that will enable 64-bit AROS to run programs written for the 32-bit version of the system.

↫ Andrzej “retrofaza” Subocz at AROS News

This is great news for AROS, as being stuck in 32bit isn’t particularly future-proof. It might not pose many problems today, as older hardware remains available and 64bit x86 processors can handle running 32bit operating systems just fine, but you never know when that will change. Int the same vein, Deadwood also released a 64bit version of Oddysey, the WebKit-based browser, which was updated this year from August 2015’s WebKit to February 2019’s WebKit. Sure, 2019 might still be a little outdated, but it does mean a ton of complex sites now work again on AROS, and that’s a hugely positive development.

Things like Python and GCC were also updated this year, and there was, as is fitting for an Amiga-inspired operating system, a lot of activity in the gaming world, including big updates to Doom 3 and ScummVM. This is just a selection of course, so be sure to read Subocz’s entire summary at AROS News.

The GPU, not the TPM, is the root of hardware DRM

Do you think streaming platforms and other entities that employ DRM schemes use the TPM in your computer to decrypt stuff? Well, the Free Software Foundation seems to think so, and adds Microsoft’s insistence on requiring a TPM for Windows 11 into the mix, but it turns out that’s simply not true.

I’m going to be honest here and say that I don’t know what Microsoft’s actual motivation for requiring a TPM in Windows 11 is. I’ve been talking about TPM stuff for a long time. My job involves writing a lot of TPM code. I think having a TPM enables a number of worthwhile security features. Given the choice, I’d certainly pick a computer with a TPM. But in terms of whether it’s of sufficient value to lock out Windows 11 on hardware with no TPM that would otherwise be able to run it? I’m not sure that’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

What I can say is that the FSF’s claim is just 100% wrong, and since this seems to be the sole basis of their overall claim about Microsoft’s strategy here, the argument is pretty significantly undermined. I’m not aware of any streaming media platforms making use of TPMs in any way whatsoever. There is hardware DRM that the media companies use to restrict users, but it’s not in the TPM – it’s in the GPU.

↫ Matthew Garrett

A TPM is imply not designed to handle decryption of media streams, and even if they were, they’re far, far too slow and underpowered to decode even a 1080P stream, let alone anything more demanding than that. In reality, DRM schemes like Google’s Widevine, Apple’s Fairplay, and Microsoft’s Playready offer different levels of functionality, both in software and in hardware. The hardware DRM stuff is all done by the GPU, and not by the TPM. By focusing so much on the TPM, Garrett argues, the FSF is failing to see how GPU makers have enabled a ton of hardware DRM without anyone noticing.

Personally, I totally understand why organisations like the Free Software Foundation are focusing on TPMs right now. They’re one of the main reasons why people can’t upgrade to Windows 11, it’s the thing people have heard about, and it’s the thing that’ll soon prevent them from getting security updates for their otherwise perfectly fine machines. I’m not sure the FSF has enough clout these days to make any meaningful media impact, especially in more general, non-tech media, but by choosing the TPM as their focus they’re definitely choosing a viable vector.

Of course, over here in the tech corner, we don’t like it when people are factually inaccurate or twisting and bending the truth, and I’m glad someone as knowledgeable as Garrett stepped up to set the record straight for us tech-focused people, while everyone else can continue to ignore this matter.

Running NetBSD on an IBM ThinkPad 380Z

Launched in 1998, the 380Z was one very fine ThinkPad. It was the last ThinkPad to come in the classic bulky and rectangular form factor. It was also one of the first to feature a huge 13.3″ TFT display, powerful 233MHz Pentium II, and whopping 160 megs of RAM.

I recently stumbled upon one in perfect condition on eBay, and immediately thought it’d be a cool vintage gadget to put on the desk. I only wondered if I could still use it for some slow-paced, distraction-free coding, using reasonably modern software.

↫ Luke’s web space

You know where this is going, right?

I evaluated a bunch of contemporary operating systems, including different variants of BSD and Linux. Usually, the experience was underwhelming in terms of performance, hardware support and stability. Well… except for NetBSD, which gave me such perfectly smooth ride, that I thought it was worth sharing.

↫ Luke’s web space

Yeah, of course it was going to be NetBSD (again). This old laptop, too, can run X11 just fine, with the EMWM that we discussed quite recently – in fact, bringing up X required no configuration, and a simple startx was all it needed out of the box. For web browsing, Dillo works just great, and building it took only about 20 minutes. It can even play some low-fi music streams from the internet, only stuttering when doing other processor-intensive tasks. In other words, this little machine with NetBSD turns out to be a great machine for some distraction-free programming.

Look, nobody is arguing that a machine like this is all you need. However, it can perform certain specific, basic tasks – anything being better than sending it to a toxic landfill, with all the transportation waste and child labour that entails. If you have old laptops lying around, you should think twice about just sending them to “recycling” (which is Western world speak for “send to toxic landfill manned by children in poor countries”), since it might be quite easy to turn it into something useful, still.

The Windows CE Developer’s Kit from 1999

Rare, hard to come by, but now available on the Internet Archive: the complete book set for the Windows CE Developer’s Kit from 1999. It contains all the separate books in their full glory, so if you ever wanted to write either a Windows CE application or driver for Windows CE 2.0, here’s all the information you’ll ever need.

The Microsoft Windows CE Developer’s Kit provides all the information you need to write applications for devices based on the Microsofte Windowso CE operating system.

↫ Windows CE Developer’s Kit

The Microsoft Windows CE Programmer’s Guide details the architecture of the operating system, how to write applications, how to implement synchronisation with a PC, and much more that pertains to developing applications. The Microsoft Windows CE User Interface Services Guide can be seen as an important addition to the Programmer’s Guide, as it details everything related to creating a GUI and how to handle various input methods.

Going a few steps deeper, and we arrive at the Microsoft Windows CE Communications Guide, which, as the name implies, tells you all you need to know about infrared connections, telephony, networking and internet connections, and related matter. Finally, we arrive at the Microsoft Windows CE Device Driver Kit, which, as the name implies, is for those of us interested in writing device drivers for Windows CE, something that will surely be of great importance in the future, since Windows CE is sure to dominate our mobile life.

To get started, you do need to have Microsoft Visual C++ version 6.0 and the Microsoft Windows CE Toolkit for Visual C++ version 6.0 up and running, since all code samples in the Programmer’s Guide are developed with it, but I’m sure you already have this taken care of – why would you be developing for any other platforms, am I right?

LineageOS 22.1, based on Android 15 QPR1, released

LineageOS, the Debian of the custom Android ROM world, released version 22 – or, 22.1 to be more exact – today. On the verge of the new year, they managed to complete the rebase to Android 15, released in September, making this one of their fastest rebases ever.

We’ve been hard at work since Android 15’s release in September, adapting our unique features to this new version of Android. Android 15 introduced several complex changes under the hood, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google’s UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to rebase onto Android 15’s code-base faster than anticipated.

Additionally, this is far-and-away the easiest bringup cycle from a device perspective we have seen in years. This means that many more devices are ready on day one that we’d typically expect to have up this early in the cycle!

↫ Nolen Johnson

LineageOS is also changing its versioning scheme to better match that of Google’s new quarterly Android releases, and that’s why this new release is 22.1: it’s based on Android 15 QPR1. In other words, the 22 aligns with the major Android version number, and the .1 with the QPR it’s based on. LineageOS 22.1 brings all the same new features as Android 15 and QPR1, as well as two brand new applications: Twelve, a replacement for LineageOS’ aging music player application, and Camelot, a new PDF reader.

The list of supported devices is pretty good for a new LineageOS release, and adds the Pixel 9 series of devices right off the bat. LineageOS 22.1 ships with the November Android security patches, and also comes with a few low-level changes, like completely new extract utilities written in Python, which massively improve extracting performance, virtIO support, and much more.

Chimera Linux enters beta

We’ve talked about Chimera Linux before – it’s a unique Linux distribution that combines a BSD userland with the LLVM/Clang toolchain, and musl. Its init system is dinit, and it uses apk-tools from Alpine as its package manager. None of this has anything to do with being anti-anything; the choice of BSD’s tools and userland is mostly technical in nature. Chimera Linux is available for x86-64, AArch64, RISC-V, and POWER (both little and big endian).

I am unreasonably excited for Chimera Linux, for a variety of reasons – first, I love the above set of choices they made, and second, Chimera Linux’ founder and lead developer, q66, is a well-known and respected name in this space. She not only founded Chimera Linux, but also used to maintain the POWER/PowerPC ports of Void Linux, which is the port of Void Linux I used on my POWER9 hardware. She apparently also contributed quite a bit to Enlightenment, and is currently employed by Igalia, through which she can work on Chimera.

With the description out of the way, here’s the news: Chimera Linux has officially entered beta.

Today we have updated apk-tools to an rc tag. With this, the project is now entering beta phase, after around a year and a half.

In general, this does not actually mean much, as the project is rolling release and updates will simply keep coming. It is more of an acknowledgement of current status, though new images will be released in the coming days.

↫ Chimera Linux’s website

Despite my excitement, I haven’t yet tried Chimera Linux myself, as I figured its pre-beta stage wasn’t meant for an idiot like me who can’t contribute anything meaningful, and I’d rather not clutter the airwaves. Now that it’s entered beta, I feel like the time is getting riper and riper for me to dive in, and perhaps write about it here. Since the goal of Chimera Linux is to be a general-purpose distribution, I think I’m right in the proper demographic of users. It helps that I’m about to set up my dual-processor POWER9 machine again, and I think I’ll be going with Chimera Linux.

As a final note, you may have noticed I consistently refer to it as “Chimera Linux”. This is very much on purpose, as there’s also something called ChimeraOS, a more standard Linux distribution aimed at gaming. To avoid confusion, I figured I’d keep the naming clear and consistent.

Running NetBSD 10.1 on a 1998 Toshiba laptop

Here are my notes on running NetBSD 10.1 on my first personal laptop that I still keep, a 1998 i586 Toshiba Satellite Pro with 81Mb of RAM and a 1Gb IBM 2.5″ IDE HD. In summary, the latest NetBSD runs well on this old hardware using an IDE to CF adapter and several changes to the i386 GENERIC kernel.

↫ Joel P.

I don’t think the BSD world – and NetBSD in particular – gets enough recognition for supporting both weird architectures and old hardware as well as it does. This here is a 26 year old laptop running the latest version of NetBSD, working X11 server and all, while other operating systems drop support for devices only a few years old. So many devices could be saved from toxic landfills if only more people looked beyond Windows and macOS.

IncludeOS: a minimal, resource efficient unikernel for cloud services

IncludeOS is an includable, minimal unikernel operating system for C++ services running in the cloud and on real HW. Starting a program with #include <os> will literally include a tiny operating system into your service during link-time.

↫ IncludeOS GitHub page

IncludeOS isn’t exactly the only one of its kind, but I’ve always been slightly mystified by what, exactly, unikernels are for. The gist is, as far as I understand it, that if you build an application using a unikernel, it will find out at compile time exactly what it needs from the operating system to run, and then everything it needs from the operating system to run will be linked inside the resulting application. This can then be booted directly by a hypervisor.

The advantages are clear: you don’t have to deal with an entire operating system just to run that one application or service you need to provide, and footprint is kept to a minimum because only the exact dependencies the application needs from the operating system are linked to it during compilation. The downsides are obvious too – you’re not running an operating system so it’s far less flexible, and if issues are found in the unikernel you’re going to have to recompile the application and the operating system bits inside of it just to fix it (at least, I think that’s the case – don’t quote me on it).

IncludeOS is under heavy development, so take that under advisement if you intend to use it for something serious. The last full release dates back to 2019, but it’s still under development as indicated by the GitHub activity. I hope it’ll push out a new release soon.

Emulating HP-UX using QEMU

While we’re out here raising funds to make me daily-drive HP-UX 11i v1we’re at 59% of the goal, so I’m starting to prepare for the pain – it seems you can actually run older versions, HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00 to be specific, in a virtual machine using QEMU.

QEMU is an open source computer emulation and virtualization software, first released in 2003 by Fabrice Bellard. It supports many different computer systems and includes support for many RISC architectures besides x86. PA-RISC emulation has been included in QEMU since 2018.

QEMU emulates a complete computer in software without the need for specific virtualization hardware. With QEMU, a full HP Visualize B160L and C3700 workstation can be emulated to run PA-RISC operating systems like HP-UX Unix and compatible applications.

↫ Paul Weissman at OpenPA

The emulation is complete enough that it can run X11 and CDE, and you can choose between emulating 32bit PA-RISC of 64bit PA-RISC. Devices and peripherals support is a bit of a mixed bag, with things like USB being only partially supported, and audio not working at all since an audio chip commonly found in PA-RISC workstations isn’t supported either. A number of SCSCI and networking devices found on HP’s workstations aren’t supported either, and a few chipsets don’t work either.

As far as operating system support goes, you can run HP-UX 10.20, HP-UX 11.00, Linux, and NetBSD. Newer (11i v1 and later) and older (9.07 and 9.05) versions of HP-UX don’t work, and neither does NeXTSTEP 3.3. Some of these issues probably stem from missing QEMU drivers, others from a lack of testing; PA-RISC is, after all, not one of the most popular of the dead UNIX architectures, with things like SPARC and MIPS usually taking most of the spotlight.

Absolutely nothing beats running operating systems on the bare metal they’re designed for, but with PA-RISC hardware becoming ever harder to obtain, it makes sense for emulation efforts to pick up speed so more people can explore HP-UX. I’m weirdly into HP-UX, despite its reputation as a difficult platform to work with, so I personally really want actual hardware, but for most of you, getting HP-UX 11i to work properly on QEMU is most likely the only way you will ever experience this commercial UNIX.