HP-UX 11i September 2001 Release Notes

Chapter 12
177
12 Compatibility
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,”
on page 191 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.
The following types of compatibility are supported from 11.0 to 11i for well-behaved
applications:
• Binary compatibility
• Source compatibility
• Data compatibility
• Relocatable object compatibility
• Upgrade compatibility
Known exceptions to compatibility are described below.
A well-behaved application adheres to the following characteristics:
• Uses only documented, public APIs