HP-UX 11i Release Notes (December 2000)

Compatibility

Compatibility from HP-UX 11.0 to 11i

Chapter 12222

Compatibility from HP-UX 11.0 to 11i

Hewlett-Packard has a long record of providing HP-UX compatibility.

This protects your investment and allows you to easily upgrade your

systems. HP has always recognized that HP-UX compatibility is an

important feature that HP customers expect.

IMPORTANT To guarantee compatibility, use the new Superdome Machine Identiﬁer.

The uname -i command on your Superdome systems may not return a

unique value for each system. To guarantee compatibility on current and

future platforms, use the new interfaces to getconf (1) and confstr (3C) to

retrieve unique machine identiﬁers.

These interfaces are documented in the manpages and in Chapter 13,

Programming, of this document.

Compatibility requirements span across HP-UX products to third party

products as well. All third party products (and products the third party

products call) are equally important components in the complete

customer environment. Customer solutions often have complex, multiple

chains of dependent applications spanning the entire range of HP-UX

products as well as third party products. One broken link in the chain of

dependencies may result in an application that no longer works. The

unbroken string of compatibility support on HP-UX is one of the biggest

and best beneﬁts provided by HP.

NOTE 11.0 applications will continue to run on HP-UX 11i.

For compatibility issues relevant to a particular component, refer to the

information in this document that describes that component.

HP-UX supports forward compatibility from 11.0 to 11i.This chapter will

describe what this means for executable applications, object ﬁles, source

ﬁles, data, and libraries, and will also discuss compatibility exceptions.