Abstract

With the release of HP-UX 10.0, Hewlett-Packard introduced many new features for the HP9000 UNIX operating system. One of these is a new file system layout paradigm, modeled after AT&T SVR4 and OSF/1. The model provides many benefits such as separating the operating system from applications, providing a solid foundation for diskless and client/server file sharing models, and aligning HP with an industry-accepted file system layout. There are two main areas affected by the new file system layout: file/directory locations and system start-up/shutdown control. As easy as this sounds, all software developers will be faced with design decisions when moving to the new model. The file system layout is a core technology upon which the operating system is built. Applications running on HP-UX 10.x may need to make modifications to their products that enable them to correctly function within the new file system model.

Although the file system paradigm is modeled after AT&T SVR4 and OSF/1, HP is not implementing either of these operating systems with Release 10.0. Rather, HP has implemented the file system model within HP-UX.