[Info-vax] OpenVMS.Org quick pool

[John Wallace]

On Aug 17, 4:31 pm, Keith Parris <keithparris_deletet... at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> On 8/16/2012 1:49 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
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> > On 2012-08-16 19:21:30 +0000, John Wallace said:
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> >> 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
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> >> "would you use OpenVMS I64 running on x86 using an Integrity Virtual
> >> Machine in a production environment"
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> >> ?
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> >> 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.
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> > As written, that question is quite confusing.  Or the questioner is
> > confused.
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> 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.
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> > 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.
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> That describes the situation today.
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>  > That question could then mean a mix of x86 and Itanium processors
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> > in the same box, such as is possible with the existing c-class
> > BladeSystem configurations.
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> No, because it says "OpenVMS I64 running on x86 ..."
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> > 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.
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> I suspect this is the most likely option.
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> 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.

In terms of "what's technically possible", I'd have thought cutting
Itanium out of the loop completely and porting VMS to AMD64 would be
an interesting option for some of the remaining customers, maybe even
for some organisations who are not currently customers. Using an
emulation layer to provide an IA64-like environment on an AMD64 box
would require constructing an IA64 *system* emulator, not just chip
emulator, on AMD64. More overhead, more points of failure.

The "VMS native on AMD64" option may not be commercially attractive to
today's HP/Intel, for various reasons (possibly even including HP
wanting the option to say "your emulated VMS on emulated IA64 too slow/
too unreliable? Buy my real IA64 instead, special offers while stocks
last").

I don't really care all that much whether we call it an emulator, a
simulator, virtualization, or a banana boat, as long as it's clear
what we're talking about. Is it clear right now? No.

Nor does the poll seem to address the question of folks who aren't
currently using VMS but might use VMS if the involvement of IA64 (in
some form) wasn't mandatory.

oh well, it's a start.