HP-UX 11i September 2002 Release Notes

Compatibility
Compatibility from HP-UX 11.0 to 11i
Chapter 14
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Compatibility from HP-UX 11.0 to 11i
Hewlett-Packard has a long record of providing HP-UX compatibility. Because it protects
your investment and allows you to upgrade easily, compatibility is an important feature
that HP has always recognized and that HP customers have come to expect.
Compatibility requirements span across HP-UX products to third-party products as well.
All third-party products (and those products they 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. Support for the unbroken string of
compatibility on HP-UX is one of the biggest and best benefits provided by HP.
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.
Compatibility exceptions will also be discussed. (For additional compatibility exceptions,
see also “EISA Interface Cards Are Not 64-bit Compatible” on page 156 and Chapter 15,
“Programming,” on page 263.)
IMPORTANT Superdome administrators:
Use the new Superdome Machine Identifier to guarantee compatibility.
Because the uname -i command on your Superdome systems may not return a unique
value for each system, you should use the new interfaces to getconf (1) and confstr (3C) to
retrieve unique machine identifiers (and thereby guarantee compatibility on current and
future platforms).
These interfaces are documented in the manpages and in Chapter 15, “Programming,”
on page 263 of this document.
General Compatibility Concerns
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
(For known exceptions to compatibility, see “Known Compatibility Exceptions from
HP-UX 11.0 to 11i” on page 251.)
A well-behaved application adheres to the following characteristics:
• Uses only documented, public APIs
• Adheres to the required practices that are specifically documented