[Info-vax] Looking for suggestions for new $GETDVI item codes

[David Froble]

Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2015-01-15 01:56:24 +0000, David Froble said:
> 
>> Maybe I'm painting with a "too broad" brush, but, today memory is 
>> cheap and plentiful.  Why not make anything that might possibly have a 
>> large value a quadword.  Yeah, lots of work up front, but perhaps not 
>> much more work to do 50-100 (or whatever) than just a few.
> 
> Sure.  Great idea.  But it's more than a little work.   For everybody.  
>  The client applications will have to be reviewed and modified to use 
> the new itemcodes, or to expect the newly- and optionally-extended 
> return fields from the existing itemcodes here.   While existing and 
> unmodified applications might not fail, the applications also won't work 
> as expected when presented with an 6 TiB disk spindle or a 32 TiB RAID6 
> volume, or whatever other fields were extended to quadwords.  These 
> existing and unmodified applications will likely either get an error 
> code they might not expect, or they'll get and process what is bogus 
> data, depending on what approach VSI might decide to do here, if VSI 
> decides to promote fields.  More than a few existing OpenVMS 
> applications haven't made it to ODS-5 support after all, so there'll be 
> more than a few that won't get updated for quadword returns...  Probably 
> fodder for a major release (V9, V10, etc), given the amount of effort 
> and change and churn that would be involved here, too.
> 
> 

Yes, I know it would be major work.  But what is the alternative for
those wanting to use large disks and such?

What about a SYSGEN parameter that all such data would respect, either
quadwords, or longwords, based upon the parameter?

Still don't have an ODS-5 disk ....