[Info-vax] VMS port to x86

[JF Mezei]

Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:

> HPVM is, as far as I know, not an emulator. If HPVM would run
> on X86, the guest OS'es would also need to be X86 versions.

The emulator company that wrote Rosetta for Apple (which did on-the-fly
endian conversion at run time for big endian OS-X PowerPC to little
endian OS-X on x86)  was purchased by... IBM .


So HP would have to write its own IA64 emulator with endian conversion
to support HP-UX on x86.  Hopefully that emulator could also run VMS in
little endian mode.

While this is good for "maintenance mode" operating systems, it isn't
really suited for on-going concerns because HP would still have to
write/update compilers for IA64 and not be able to benefit from fine
tuning on x86, and folks like Oracle would still have to write for
Itanium platform, something they don't want to do because Itanium is dead.


However, the plan is to allow IA64 and X86 blades to co-exist in the
same chassis. So your legacy apps can run on an IA64 blade while your
port/develop them on x86 blades and once ready, you just switch them to
the new environment in the same cabinet.

I suspect Odyssey will have hardware based partitioning to allow
different architectures and totally separate instances to co-exist
without needing HPVM.