[Info-vax] OT: IBM Offering $9-10 Per Share for Sun

[JF Mezei]

Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> But I find it very difficult to believe that it is something
> where the "let a handful of engineers do a little work in their
> spare time" approach will produce anything usable.

Usable ? No. Proof of concept that is usable as basis to do a full
fledged port, Yes.

The first thing that needs to be done is to find out how VMS can work
within today's 8086 architectures (modes, memory protection, registers
etc). Then they need a cross compiler to get the early stuff compiled
and I guess that start by doing the VMS interface to EFI, and other very
low level stuff like memory, process management probably up to sysboot.

Remember that our real engineers know this stuff inside out because they
are not newbies who just got 2 weeks of training. They've gone through
the port to that IA64 thing (and know how the source come is handled to
allow cross platform common source code, and many of them also did the
VAX to Alpha port.

What the midnight hack guys need to do is to show that VMS can run on
that platform by having solved any of the issues imposed by that
architecture.

Consider the port to that IA64 thing. They had to find a way to get ODS
file system to coexist with a DOS partition where EFI code resides. And
they had to make sure that IA64 had the features needed by VMS and if
now, find ways around it. Once that was done, the rest would be fairly
mechanical (but time consuming).