Porting TRU64 UNIX™ on Avanti™ emulator

Abstract

Real time processing is becoming an increasingly important discipline. It is one of the mandatory requirements in industrial applications in order to achieve the five general areas: determinism, responsiveness, user control, reliability and fail soft operation; but what is the solution if you have aging hardware like my company? You will meet big problems and huge workload to maintain and develop your system and its applications. How can you keep your legacies alive? You need an alternative approach. Emulation will allow you to use new hardware without having to change the application, improve up-time and reliability, save floor space, power and maintenance cost, make the application faster, and preserve the past investment in the application. In this paper I perform a case in my company which was TRU64 UNIX™ O/S installed on DEC Alpha servers™. This paper will explain the way of porting it into two virtual emulators Avanti™ and FreeAXP™ and the problems that faced us during porting.