[Info-vax] Alpha emulator for OSX

[Paul Sture]

On 2016-02-04, Alex Rubens <alexrubensnj at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, February 3, 2016 at 5:26:32 PM UTC-5, Sum1 wrote:
>> Does anyone have first-hand experience of running an Alpha emulator on 
>> OSX.  Not in a virtual machine on OSX using VMware or Parallels, but 
>> something that runs natively on OSX?
>> 
>> And if you do, which emulator is it, any problems configuring and 
>> running...I am after the information for hobbyist use, a DS10L is dying 
>> and I will probably need to move down the emulation path.
>
> Think about what you're saying, an Alpha emulator is virtualization.
> Native on OSX, do you mean running bootcamp on your mac? In that case,
> VSI hasn't gotten VMS ported to x86-64 yet.

He's asking for an emulator, not virtualization.

Virtualization is where you can take an OS built* for a given
architecture and run it as a guest on an OS host also built* for that
architecture.

* where "built" = assembled/compiled/linked to produce appropriate
executables

The principle of virtualization (as used by KVM, VMware, VirtualBox etc)
is that you are running as much client executable code as possible
directly on hardware which supports it. Emulation should only be done
when necessary, e.g. emulating specific storage types, network cards etc.

For example on the Intel 64 bit Mac I am typing this on, I have several
VMware clients.  These are all installations which run natively on the
x86-64 architecture (and yes, that includes 32-bit versions if you want
those).

I also have SimH here, which is an emulator supporting the VAX hardware
instruction set (and others such as PDP and selected HP & IBM machines).
Every single instruction has to be emulated.

P.S. if anyone is interested I have got VMS running under SimH in a
SmartOS zone.  I have yet to get the networking going, but VMS itself
is running fine.  Tip: don't use the pkgsrc version of SimH, as it's
missing support for the RAUSER disks and is built without networking
support; compile your own instead.

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