[Info-vax] Are any Itanium firmware versions still legally available for free ?

[Simon Clubley]

Are any Itanium firmware versions that support the latest version of
Itanium VMS still legally available for free ?

I know they were closed off several years ago, but an online newspaper
article at the time claims that security updates would still be
freely available to everyone:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/176468-customer-disservice-hp-cuts-off-firmware-fixes-for-enterprise-customers-without-ongoing-service-plans

Is that article incorrect ?

My reason for asking is that I briefly looked at what would be involved
in writing an Itanium emulator as a possible future project sometime.

I quickly came to the conclusion that it's way too big a project for
me for the foreseeable future but also that I couldn't find any legal
way to freely obtain the required firmware to run on the emulator,
which would make the project non-viable anyway.

This isn't a problem for VAX or Alpha. SimH has a version of VMB
which allows you to use VAX/VMS and the Alpha firmware is available
for use with the Alpha emulators.

It's just Itanium firmware that seems to be heavily locked down.

Of course, even if the firmware is freely and legally available, the next
question then becomes if the install kit can even be broken down in a way
that allows you to directly extract the firmware images for use within an
emulator. :-)

Simon.

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