[Info-vax] OpenVMS.Org quick pool

[Keith Parris]

On 8/16/2012 1:49 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2012-08-16 19:21:30 +0000, John Wallace said:
>
>> On Aug 16, 2:37 pm, Ian Miller <g... at uk2.net> wrote:
>>> OpenVMS.Org are looking to collect and confirm some information about
>>> OpenVMS users and usage. Please take a few minutes to complete this
>>> 13 question poll. Your input is
>>> valuable.http://www.openvms.org/pages.php?page=Quick-Poll
>>
>> "would you use OpenVMS I64 running on x86 using an Integrity Virtual
>> Machine in a production environment"
>>
>> ?
>>
>> If that is intended to read as it is written, then it might be helpful
>> to expand on the concept a bit (a linked page? or is the Wikipedia
>> article sufficient?), for the benefit of those VMS folk who until now
>> have had no interest in what's been available on IA64.
>
> As written, that question is quite confusing.  Or the questioner is
> confused.

Or perhaps it's more a matter of trying to describe something that 
doesn't yet exist in terms of familiar things that do exist.

> The HP Integrity Virtual Machine product is an Itanium-only
> product, and restricted to specific recent Itanium processors in
> Integrity servers, and restricted to hosting non-nested guest operating
> systems (including OpenVMS) atop the HP-UX host operating system.   You
> can't stack an HP VM atop an HP VM, unlike what is possible with IBM
> VM.

That describes the situation today.

 > That question could then mean a mix of x86 and Itanium processors
> in the same box, such as is possible with the existing c-class
> BladeSystem configurations.

No, because it says "OpenVMS I64 running on x86 ..."

> Or that there's consideration being given
> here around an x86-64 port of an Itanium emulator, and this question
> would be an odd way to pursue/announce/consider that engineering work.

I suspect this is the most likely option.

I'm not privy to any plans, but thinking in terms of what's technically 
possible: Consider what you would have it you took the Ski Itanium CPU 
emulator (which lacks emulation of any platform hardware) and added 
enough code from HP VM to provide a platform environment which looks 
just like HP VM to the VMS instance inside (with the HP VM code adjusted 
for endian-ness, and to run on Linux instead of HP-UX). No changes would 
be required in OpenVMS I64 code for it to run inside such an environment.