[Info-vax] x86 Update 4/22/19

[Jon Pinkley]

On Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 5:55:24 AM UTC-4, clair... at vmssoftware.com wrote:
> On Monday, April 22, 2019 at 9:30:33 PM UTC-4, terry-... at glaver.org wrote:
> > On Monday, April 22, 2019 at 7:48:26 PM UTC-4, Jon Pinkley wrote:
> > > Isn't there supposed to be a Login as well?
> > 
> > Maybe this was done with the equivalent of "SET/STARTUP OPA0:"?
> 
> There are number of ways to look at "login". Yes, we did force OPA0: to be our First Boot path.

Anyone that understands software development understands the magnitude of the task being done by the small team at VSI, so don't take this as me throwing brickbats.

I think everyone is looking forward to the completed DIRECTORY command, but the path through login for an interactive process is quite a bit more complex than directory, since it involves SYSTEM context (terminal driver and mailbox driver), Job Controller Context and Newly created Process context. It tests a lot more of the system, and would indicate that much more of the VMS foundation is in place.  LOGINOUT is a complex program; the OpenVMS Alpha Internals 7.0 Manual has almost 10 pages devoted just to the Interactive process case (439,440,443-450).

In my opinion, leaving this out is a significant "lowering of the bar" to what constitutes "first boot", assuming that first boot did include an interactive login from the console in previous ports.

The vast majority of the people that follow comp.os.vms are "hard core VMS supporters", so we are interested in any technical details that can be provided.

The recent milestones have no content other than "ACHIEVED" (milestones 16 and below had examples of console output, which at least I found interesting).

I understand that writing progress reports takes time away from the real work being done. But it shouldn't take an inordinate amount of time to copy/paste some console output into the updates page.  You should be doing this for internal documentation anyway.

For example, what does the output of show system look like at this point in time?