[Info-vax] IS everyone waiting?

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <558780b0-b6c1-4d38-839a-d0de358f938e at googlegroups.com>,
abrsvc <dansabrservices at yahoo.com> writes: 

> > I remember the promise of VSI to support (at least) Alpha and X46 (and=20
> > Itanium) in a mixed-architecture cluster.
> 
> There was some discussion about this at the bootcamp this year.  IRRC, the =
> result was that mixed clusters would be supported and that VSI versions of =
> the software would likely be required. And yes, this includes an Alpha vers=
> ion.  This may require an upgrade to V8.4 though.  

Yes, 8.4.  Perhaps some special 8.4.x.

I went to from 7.3-2 to 8.4 on one machine, but since DECwindows stopped 
working, I haven't upgraded the others.  It would take some time to 
solve the problem, and by then X86 might be available, where I'll have 
to do a fresh install anyway.  Yes, VMS on x86 won't support high-end 
graphics, but the on-chip graphics will be used for DECwindows, which is 
probably all I need.

(I could do a fresh install of 8.4 and see what happens, but that would
mean having to add back in various customizations and so on.  It would
be nice if one could easily do an almost fresh install, i.e. separate
the system disk into stuff which really needs to be changed in an
upgrade, and other stuff which is customizable.  I've done this to a
large extent already in order to make it easier to clone a system disk,
but this requires some changes on the system disk which a fresh install
would overwrite.  On a related note, SYS$COMMON is a mixture of stuff
shared by all nodes booting from that system disk and stuff shared by
all VMS systems in the world.  In a cluster with more than one system
disk, there is a need for a non-system disk common to all nodes in the
cluster where stuff like SYS$SYLOGIN, SYSUAF and so on can reside.  This
can be done, but folks roll their own.  One can redefine SYS$SYSROOT,
but this can be tricky.  Also, this would give a fixed order for the
translations, which might not be always appropriate.)