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

[JF Mezei]

With the Poulson support done, I take it focus now goes to the port to
the 8086 ?

Considering x86 hardware is widely available, will this cause a
different approach to the early porting stages porting compared to IA64
and Alpha that started off on emulators ?

Or do emulators provide additional debugging tools that are valuable to
the low level engineering for early steps ?

In what language is the EFI boot programme written ? (in the EFI
"partition" in the ODS disk)

Is the EFI source code used for IA64 easily recyclable by compiling it
using x86 as target ? Or does it require major changes ?

What about the first file in [SYSEXE] that is loaded (forget exact
name), are the early parts written in x86 assembler ? Macro ?

Considering that the early stage interfaces with EFI, would that portion
also make it easy to port by just recompiling it with x86 as target ?

Would it be correct to state that the architecture differences really
start to matter after VMS has obtained from EFI the system configuration
and starts to load its own drivers ?

When a machine boots, how much is written in native assembler, how much
in Macro ? and at what point do higher level languages such as C become
usable ? (aka: at what boot message does VMS switch from native
assembler to macro and at what boot message do higher level language
code kick in ?