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

[Arne Vajhøj]

JF Mezei wrote:
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 
>> What should be the point?
>>
>> HP's management knows that it can be done.
> 
> Not necesaarily. Consider NSK under Compaq/Pfeiffer where he undertook
> to port NSK to Alpha. NSK had special features that required "lockstep"
> which was a feature that needed to be added to Alpha (scheduled to come
> with EV7, not sure if they bothered).
> 
> NSK might be able to run on 8086, but it would require special motherboard.

NSK in it current way of doing things has some special
hardware requirements.

VMS does not have these requirements.

And even how NSK works could be changed if HP decided to.

> So it is not obvious to anyone whether VMS could run on today's 8086 on
> commodity boards with EFI or whether it would need a special board, or
> whether they absolutely need a certain feature be added to the 8086.

It is very obvious to me.


If there is funding to make it happen they could get VMS x64 9.0 to
work.

It may require some changes. But VAX 32 bit to Alpha 64 bit certainly
came with some changes as well.

> So if you have a midnight hack that looks into those issues and confirms
> via that proof of concept that VMS could run on commodity EFI based 64
> bit 8086s systems,

I can not see why the VMS engineers would do that.

And if they did why HP senior management should consider it relevant.

>                  this is significant information that HP should know
> because if it is planning a post IA64 life, it is important to know
> whether your OS can run on commodity systems or still requires special
> systems be built.

It will do whatever senior management decide it will.

> The proof of concept can also provide estimates on how many man hours
> would be needed (akaL how difficult the port) and whether shared code
> base between alpha/IA64 and 8086 is possible.

They have done it twice before.

A POC may reduce the uncertainty of the estimates a bit, but basically
they do know what it will cost.

Arne