Developer DEC, HP, IBM, Compaq Source model Closed source | OS family Unix | |
Working state Retired (supported until December 2012) Initial release January 1992; 25 years ago (1992-01) Latest release 5.1B-6 / October 1, 2010; 6 years ago (2010-10-01) | ||
Tru64 UNIX is a discontinued 64-bit UNIX operating system for the Alpha instruction set architecture (ISA), currently owned by Hewlett-Packard (HP). Previously, Tru64 UNIX was a product of Compaq, and before that, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where it was known as Digital UNIX (formerly DEC OSF/1 AXP).
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As its original name suggests, Tru64 UNIX is based on the OSF/1 operating system. DEC's previous UNIX product was known as Ultrix and was based on BSD.
It is unusual among commercial UNIX implementations, as it is built on top of the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University. (Other UNIX implementations built on top of the Mach kernel are NeXTSTEP, MkLinux, Mac OS X and Apple iOS.)
Tru64 UNIX required the SRM boot firmware found on Alpha-based computer systems.
OSF/1
In 1988, during the so-called "Unix wars", DEC joined with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and others to form the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to develop a version of Unix. Dubbed OSF/1, the aim was to compete with System V Release 4 from AT&T Corporation and Sun Microsystems, and it has been argued that a primary goal was for the operating system to be free of AT&T intellectual property. The fact that OSF/1 was one of the first operating systems to use the Mach kernel is cited as support of this assertion. Digital also strongly promoted OSF/1 for real-time applications, and with traditional UNIX implementations at the time providing poor real-time support at best, the real-time and multi-threading support was heavily dependent on the Mach kernel. It also incorporated a large part of the BSD kernel (based on the 4.3-Reno release) to provide UNIX API. Back at the time of its proliferation, OSF/1 was the third major flavor of UNIX together with System V and BSD.
DEC's original release of OSF/1 (OSF/1 Release 1.0) was in January 1992 for their line of MIPS-based DECstation workstations, however this was never a fully supported product and was cancelled before the end of the year. DEC ported OSF/1 to their new Alpha AXP platform (as DEC OSF/1 AXP), and this was the first version (Release 1.2) of what is most commonly referred to as OSF/1. DEC OSF/1 AXP Release 1.2 was shipped on March 1993. OSF/1 AXP was a full 64-bit operating system and the native UNIX implementation for the Alpha architecture. From OSF/1 AXP V2.0 onwards, UNIX System V compatibility was also integrated into the system.
Other vendors
HP also released a port of OSF/1 to the early HP 9000/700 workstations based on the PA-RISC 1.1 architecture. This was withdrawn soon afterwards due to lack of software and hardware support compared to competing operating systems, namely HP-UX.
Apple Computer intended to base A/UX 4.0 for their PowerPC-based Macintoshes on OSF/1, but the project was cancelled.
IBM used OSF/1 as the basis of the AIX/ESA operating system for System/370 and System/390 mainframes.
OSF/1 was also ported by Kendall Square Research to their proprietary processor architecture used in the KSR1 supercomputer.
In 1994, after AT&T had sold UNIX System V to Novell and the rival Unix International consortium had disbanded, the Open Software Foundation ceased funding of research and development of OSF/1.
OSF/1 AD
OSF/1 AD (Advanced Development) was a distributed version of OSF/1 developed for massively parallel supercomputers by Locus Computing Corporation. Variants of OSF/1 AD were used on several such systems, including the Intel Paragon XP/S and ASCI Red, Convex Exemplar SPP-1200 (as SPP-UX) and the Hitachi SR2201 (as HI-UX MPP).
Digital UNIX
In 1995, starting with release 3.2, DEC renamed OSF/1 AXP to Digital UNIX to reflect its conformance with the X/Open Single UNIX Specification.
After Compaq's purchase of DEC in early 1998, with the release of version 4.0F, Digital UNIX was renamed to Tru64 UNIX to emphasise its 64-bit-clean nature and de-emphasise the Digital brand.
In April 1999, Compaq announced that Tru64 UNIX 5.0 successfully ran on Intel's IA-64 simulator. However, this port was cancelled a few months later.
A Chinese version of Tru64 UNIX named COSIX was jointly developed by Compaq and China National Computer Software & Technology Service Corporation (CS&S). It was released in 1999.
TruCluster Server
From release V5.0 Tru64 UNIX offered a clustering facility named TruCluster Server. TruCluster utilised a cluster-wide filesystem visible to each cluster member, plus member specific storage and an optional quorum disk. Member specific files paths were enhanced symbolic links incorporating the member id of the owning member. Each member had one or zero votes, which, combined with a possible quorum disk, implemented a cluster formation algorithm similar to that found in OpenVMS.
Current status
With their purchase of Compaq in 2002, HP announced their intention to migrate many of Tru64 UNIX's more innovative features (including its AdvFS, TruCluster, and LSM) to HP-UX. In December 2004, HP announced a change of plan: they would instead use the Veritas File System and abandon the Tru64 advanced features. In the process, many of the remaining Tru64 developers were laid off.
The current maintenance release, 5.1B-6 was released in October 2010.
In October 2010, HP stated that they would continue to support Tru64 UNIX until 31 December 2012.
In 2008, HP contributed the AdvFS filesystem to the open source community.
Versions
These versions were released for Alpha AXP platforms.