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

[Christopher]

On Apr 5, 3:59 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> 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

A cross compiler is not necessary. gcc will compile the code handily
on an x86 windows, linux, or solaris box.

> 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.

The processor doesn't really have anything to do with it.  From an
instruction set perspective, x64 is rich and comprehensive.  There are
really only a couple of ways to do system calls, and the architecture
is optimized to do it in one particular fashion.

The big deal is really going to be the system board, and to some
extent the drivers and driver interface.

Some of you may already know about http://www.systella.fr/~bertrand/FreeVMS/indexGB.html

I don't know how complete this thing is, but it seems to be a one-man
job.