[Info-vax] IBM nearing deal to acquire Red Hat

[clair.grant@vmssoftware.com]

On Tuesday, April 16, 2019 at 6:02:40 PM UTC-4, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 4/16/2019 5:26 PM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> > When VMS runs on x86, how easy will it be to run VMS on a standard cloud
> > platform?
> 
> Very easy I hope.

No offense, but I had to smile at this a bit. You don't just "run on x86" because everyone's x86 is different..bare metal as well as VM guests. For example, for HW we are concentrating on the DL380 (Intel). We've put the DL385 (AMD) on the back burner for now because it is so different than the 380 and we need to get  a few things completely working ASAP. We'll get back to the 385 later but at least we know shark-invested waters await. I can hardly wait to see what a Dell server does.

In the VM world you are at the mercy of what the programmers think an x86 should be, right down to the firmware, UEFI, and ACPI. Some have console variables, some don't. For those that do, some are sticky and some are not. We gave on console variables and are using a file.

The differences in platforms mostly revolve around device discovery and enumeration, memory layout, clock emulation, etc.  We'll figure it all out but every single thing we boot on provides a new adventure. Did I mention starting secondary CPUs? Wow.






> 
> I believe running in VM and cloud support are high on VSI roadmap.
> 
> But I don't know specifically if they have said that it will
> run in AWS and Azure.
> 
> Arne