[Info-vax] September 6, 2016 - new Roadmap and State of the Port updates now on VSI website

[Simon Clubley]

On 2016-09-07, Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> wrote:
> On 2016-09-07, clairgrant71 at gmail.com <clairgrant71 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As promised......first week in September updates.
>
> URLs for those:
>
><https://vmssoftware.com/pdfs/VSI_Roadmap_20160906.pdf>
>
><https://vmssoftware.com/pdfs/State_of_Port_20160906.pdf>
>

Thank you Clair (and Paul for the links).

Some very interesting reading indeed.

>From the Roadmap:

I see we are about 18 months to 2 years away from an Early Adopters
x86-64 release although the new file system looks like it's going to
show up earlier in IA64 (but with the current 32 bit size limitations).

I wonder what "Enhanced Application Isolation and Management" means ?
Is it SELinux MAC type security or more a chroot/jail type security ?

I like the idea of a dynamic binary translator for Alpha _and_ IA64.
(Unrelated, but I recently looked around for an IA64 full system
emulator which would run IA64 VMS but without success. It looks
like IA64 wasn't popular enough to justify a full system emulator
being written for it.)

I also like the additional emphasis on security in years to come.

BTW, thank you for adding the additional scripting language to the
research areas.

The fact you are investigating MariaDB _and_ PostgreSQL is nice; but
seeing Erlang on the list was a _major_ surprise. I wonder what is
driving that ?

>From the State of the Port:

I see you are planning to support C using the GEM frontend but you
are switching to clang for C++. I assume that's to track the ongoing
language enhancements to C++ without you having to continue to expand
resources performing your own implementation of those enhancements.

I see Ada still has a question mark against it. It looks like that's
still causing some discussions internally. :-)

With the two processor mode situation, are you far enough along with
the port to get a feeling for the overheads of emulating executive mode
when it comes to switching page tables on the user mode -> executive
mode -> kernel mode -> executive mode -> user mode path while using RMS ?

I'm wondering just how painful TLB invalidation has proven to be in
real life when you are switching page tables. I know that was an early
concern of mine but others pointed out that x86-64 had features (the
PCID support) which I was unaware of and which could reduce the pain
dramatically.

Once again Clair, thank you for producing these documents and allowing
us to see how work on x86-64 VMS is progressing.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world