[Info-vax] VSI software

[Dave Froble]

On 8/6/2020 6:42 AM, David Goodwin wrote:
> On Thursday, August 6, 2020 at 3:36:20 PM UTC+12, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> I've been assuming that support for Alpha systems with processors prior
>> to EV6 will be omitted from the upcoming OpenVMS Alpha releases
>> (V8.4-2L2 requires EV6 or later), but I don't know if that's been
>> announced by VSI.
>
> I've been wondering about this. I do have a dual-processor DS20 but the thing is so big, heavy and power hungry (plus IIRC there is something wrong with it) that I just use an AlphaServer 800 instead. But if an EV5 and an x86 can't exist in the same cluster then I guess I'll have to sort out the DS20 and just run it on special occasions.
>

Not that VSI will actually do what one might expect.

Regardless, V8.4-2L1 and V8.4-2L2 are exactly the same code base, with 
2L2 compiled to take advantage of EV6 capabilities.  At least that is my 
understanding.  So, I'd expect that one could consider 2L1 "standard" 
and 2L2 "special" for EV6.

It doesn't seem reasonable to not be as inclusive as possible, so I'd 
expect the "standard" builds to include CPUs prior to EV6.

I guess we all just wait to discover what will happen.

-- 
David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
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