Transition Impacts

standards compliance impacts summary

There are some standards-related improvements in HP-UX 11.x, including conformance to POSIX and changes to the HP-UX commands. Some of these changes may require you to modify your source code.

HP-UX 11.x conforms to the following standards:

• ANSI/IEEE P1003.1-1996 (POSIX system calls and libraries) and P1003.2 (POSIX commands)
• Federal Information Processing Standard, FIPS-151-2 (P1003.1 plus Federal interpretations) and FIPS-189.
• X/Open Portability Guide release 4 (XPG4) and UNIX95 profile of XPG4 specifications
• LP64 industry de facto standard 64-bit data model

Additional HP-UX 11.x features provide partial conformance to the UNIX98 and C99 specifications.

HP-UX command changes

Some of the commands and their options have changed in HP-UX 11.x, to conform to UNIX standards. This could potentially cause problems in your Makefiles and source files when transitioning your application. Following is a list of potential problems.

• The default command option may have changed.
• The command output may be changed.
• The command option may now be obsolete, or will be obsolete in future releases.
• The command location may have changed.
• The command is not backward compatible.
• The command cannot support new features of HP-UX 11.x.

Conformance to POSIX

HP-UX 11.x conforms to the POSIX 1003.1c standard. This conformance required several changes to HP-UX.

• Several APIs (known as the Posix_r APIs) present in libc in earlier versions of HP-UX have been changed to conform to this standard. To accommodate these changes, HP-UX 11.x has implemented the following:

• libc.2 and libc.a implement the versions of these APIs that conform to the POSIX standard.
• Older versions of Posix_r APIs are moved from libc to libd4r.1.

This change has the following implications:

• DCE applications that recompile or relink on HP-UX 11.x have to link in libd4r.1 for compatibility.
• Libraries that use these APIs may have to version to support kernel threads.

• The implementation of sigwait() in libcma has been changed.

• libc.2 and libc.a implement the versions of these APIs that conform to the POSIX standard.
• Older versions of Posix_r APIs are moved from libc to libd4r.1.

This change has the following implications:

• DCE applications that recompile or relink on HP-UX 11.x have to link in libd4r.1 for compatibility.
• Libraries that use these APIs may have to version to support kernel threads.

• The implementation of sigwait() in libcma has been changed.

• libc.2 and libc.a implement the versions of sigwait() that conform to the POSIX standard.
• Older versions of sigwait() remain in libcma.1.

This change has the following implication:

• Thread-safe libraries that use sigwait() must test whether they are in a kernel-threaded application or user space-threaded application to call sigwait() correctly.

  +C ST

  -C ST

For more information

List of Standards Compliance Impacts Programming for UNIX 95 and HP-UX Binary Compatibility(.pdf)