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

[John E. Malmberg]

On 1/28/2019 12:49 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.

If your objective is to run non-privileged OpenVMS binaries on that 
emulator and not full emulation, then as long as you have an OpenVMS 
host, you do not need the firmware.

You just need a program to load the IA64 image into memory, a code 
translator / emulator, and then a system to detect if a subroutine call 
to an external module can be handled by calling a native image.

Privileged code is also doable.  A bit more complex to implement 
properly to make sure no security holes were added.

The features would be limited to the version of VMS on the host.

Regards,
-John