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

[Arne Vajhøj]

Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> JF Mezei 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.
>>
>> What should be the point?
>>
>> HP's management knows that it can be done.
>>
>> They don't want to spend the money on it.
>>
>> Doing a POC that shows it is possible is pointless.
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> People with that level of skills are most likely already overloaded
>> with work.
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> VMS can run on x86-64 - it is only a question about how much need
>> to be changed. If something is not available then that feature
>> will not be part of VMS on that platform.
> 
> One of the best parts of the VAX-Alpha port was that VMS remained VMS 
> and if your application code did not have hardware dependencies, such as 
> hard coded 512 byte page size, the port was a breeze!  You called the 
> same system services with the same arguments and got the same results.
> 
> I ported Tony Ivanov's "make" utility to Alpha.  I had to clean up a few 
> things to make them conform to the ANSI C Standard and make the compiler 
> quit complaining.  Once I cleaned up the K&Risms it compiled without 
> error and worked.  ISTR that I found and fixed a fairly trivial bug 
> along the way.  I think I also ported Gnu grep and Gnu gawk around the 
> same time.  Those ports were also trivial to do; make the compiler stop 
> complaining and they just worked.
> 
> A VMS port that does not support all the features of VMS would be a 
> pretty lame port!

The C RTL and VMS system services are not that dependent on the
hardware.

4 modes and some page protection is what comes to my mind.

Getting HLL code and DCL scipts to run should not be a problem.

The VMS core with scheduling, memory management and IO would need
to use the features available.

Just as they did for I64. It was not designed for VMS as the
two previous were.

Arne