[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[Robert A. Brooks]

On 8/21/2012 1:33 PM, David Froble wrote:

> And I will admit, item lists can sometimes be a bit confusing, but can
> also be rather versatile.

Ha!

I'm working on firmware for the X86 blades in a SuperDome 2 enclosure 
(DragonHawk), and I needed to design an API
to retrieve some information from memory DIMM SPD (serial presence 
detect) data.

It needed to be version independent and backward compatible such that 
the API must work with multiple versions of the SPD.

I dusted off the concept of item codes and item lists, and to my 
pleasant surprise, the idea was well-received.  My colleagues thought it 
was neat that you could retrieve multiple pieces of data with a single 
call.  These folks have likely never used VMS in any capacity.

It's not quite identical to the way that VMS uses item lists, in that 
the item list structure that I use contains a return status, such that
for multiple items, a failure of any one item does not halt the item 
list processing.  There is also a simplified single-item code return
return that's similar to the "LIB$" wrapper for $GETDVI, etc...

Anyway, my concept has been extended to create an API to return
CPU PIRom (processor ROM) data.

These are not end-user-visible APIs; they exist only for the firmware 
that runs on the onboard administrator (OA) or processor-dependent 
hardware controller (PDHC) on the SuperDome 2.

		-- Rob