[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[ChrisQ]

On 08/22/12 08:22, Paul Sture wrote:

> They did try a new file system.
>
> "The Death of Spiralog"
>
> http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/System-Management/Why-was-Spiralog-retired/
> td-p/4951205
>
> "Hein van den Heuvel  01-10-2006 03:46 AM
>
> Mostly it was a day late and a dollar (sic)short. Besides the technical
> challenge, there was the challenge of a remote engineering group (Dollar
> (the town), Scotland
>
> Timing/Politics (internal to VMS, and the future of VMS as seen at the
> time)/Engineering resources and such all played a role."
>

It's strange, in that they did put a lot of effort into alternative file 
systems
later with advfs for tru64 and I think the sources have now been at least
patially made open source by hp. Don't know enough about it to say how 
well it
would stack up now against newer filesystems such as zfs and some others 
for linux.

In the end though, what get's stored on disk is a stream of bytes at the 
lowest
level. To make the most flexible use of that, an interface to that 
stream should
be provided, even if there are other structures eg: rms, above. Someone else
said that the qio interface could be used, but seem to remember that as 
being
fairly arcane at the time.

I guess the argument is whether structure like rms should be integrated 
into the
filesystem, or whether it should be a separate layer. Provided it's done 
right,
either approach should be equally valid afaics...

Regards,

Chris