[Info-vax] VSI: "Official 8.4-1H1 Launch"

[clairgrant71 at gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 4, 2015 at 4:29:45 AM UTC-4, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> IanD skrev den 2015-06-04 01:28:
> > On Wednesday, June 3, 2015 at 11:17:53 AM UTC+10, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> >> On 6/2/15 6:16 PM, IanD wrote:
> >>
> >>> I guess to start with it will be a port to Intel with as few
> >>> functional changes as necessary just to get the OS across - more
> >>> major works and future based changes will come along later
> >>
> >> Or you could read the roadmap and not guess quite as much:
> >>
> >> http://www.vmssoftware.com/pdfs/VMS_Software_Roadmap_20150224.pdf
> >
> > My comments were more high level guess by myself as to the likely
> > strategy of moving OpenVMS to Intel X86
> >
> > The roadmap doesn't spell out the details of what aspects of the OS will
> > make it over to Intel initially. I know the roadmap states 'Architecture
> > Common' and that may mean everything existing moved forward or it may
> > mean lowest common denominator - it's hard to know
> >
> > For example, will all clustering topologies make it in the first release
> > or will only the most common make it first round?
> 
> I do not know what "all" means here, but I expect to see those
> "clustering topologies" that makes sense on the actual X86 systems.
> Then maybe "upgrade only support" (or whatever it it called) for
> those topologies that might be needed for an move to x86.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   Without the specifics,
> > which the roadmap does not give (and I didn't expect it to give), I
> > merely guessed at the likely philosophy behind how the port might be
> > done
> >
> > It will be interesting (actually exciting) to see an updated roadmap in
> > say 6 or  even 12 months time to see the progress being made and
> > hopefully to see more specific details :-)
> >

"All" means everything unless there is some very specific reason why something in VMS doesn't make sense on the future platform and that would be really rare. I had a slide once that depicted 5% of VMS knows about the platform and the other 95% does not. Once you get the compilers and the 5% working you get the rest for free. For example, there is absolutely nothing to do to make clustering work on a new platform; it is part of the 95%. There may be some restrictions as to what previous versions of VMS can be clustered with the new version but we have always tried to keep those to a minimum.

For first boot (remember the Itanium Boot Contest?) we will leave out a lot of stuff not necessary to boot, login, and do a DIRECTORY command, but once we move to building the entire system you get everything.