[Info-vax] IA64 full system emulator ?

[BillPedersen]

On Thursday, September 22, 2016 at 5:39:18 PM UTC-4, IanD wrote:
> On Thursday, September 22, 2016 at 9:17:39 AM UTC+10, Simon Clubley wrote:
> > Does anyone know of an IA64 full system emulator which could boot VMS ?
> > 
> > I'm expecting the answer to be no as I have not found _anything_
> > while searching but I thought I would ask anyway.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > Simon.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
> > Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world
> 
> I've searched around the place and never found anything either other than references on Hoff's page and a few other sites pointing to the same Sourceforge destination
> 
> http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/983
> 
> At some point in time I would have thought VSI or Stormasys might develop something for when OpenVMS moves away from Itanium but I wonder if it would be worth it. 
> I think most people who have gone to Itanium are on applications / software that can be ported much easier than some of the old Alpha stuff (like where I am), so the market need for an Itanium emulator might not be there?
> 
> I certainly would love to have one - then again, where is VSI's hobbyist program...

Standing up a new cross-platform virtualization environment is a non-trivial task. Even with a starting point like the SKI instruction emulator.  And you have to recall that that effort was not multi-core and still had to have a lot of glue added for memory management, IO and the like.

The other issue is whether it would have ever been sufficiently efficient to offer an alternative.  Even now having 4+ GHz x64 processors does not translate into impressive numbers for the resultant virtualized system.

And of course then there is the question of whether it would be economical to in fact build such a product.  Part of the benefit with the VAX and Alpha product as well as the Sun and HP 3000 are they replace systems which are costly to run and maintain so the ROI is fairly quick - in some cases less than a year.  It is not clear whether the same could be said for an I64 implementation given its relative newness.

You have to remember the first virtualized VAX products did not appear until the late 1990s and the first virtualized Alpha was not until about 2006 or so and that was an implementation of a product from about 12 to 15 years before.

So I am not surprised that there is no offering.  And even if there was development and an offering then getting the owner of VMS to allow it to be licensed on that is the next hurdle.

Bill.