[Info-vax] New guide for hobbyists, OpenVMS 8.4 installation with networking on AXPbox (modern fork of es40)

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 14:28:00 UTC, John E. Malmberg  wrote:
> On 11/9/2020 8:34 AM, Remy van Elst wrote:
> > 
> > If you could spare some time, reporting a bug on Github with more
> > information (version of visual studio etc, command output) would put
> > it on the list for us to work on eventually
> 
> I do not recall seeing any response to my replies to you on the 
> encompasserve.org notes forum.
> 
> I am curious to see if the axpbox will give usable performance on a 
> RPI-2B or RPI-3.
> 
> SimH/VAX will now support building an infoserver appliance.  There are 
> some bugs in the Makefile that are easily worked around.   I have not 
> had time to post an article of how to make it work.
> 
> LXC-libvirt being broken for privileged images was the only roadblock I 
> have to getting the infoserver fully functional on the network the way I 
> want it.  I could fall back to qemu libvirt, but that is much more 
> overhead than I want to maintain.
> 
> The Infoserver appliance is an easy to setup network disk server.  Not 
> sure if tape emulation works on the SimH implementation.
> 
> It takes up one core of a Rasperry Pi to run SimH/VAX infoserver as 
> there is no idle loop detection available.
> 
> Most OpenVMS hardware and emulator can network boot from an Inforserver, 
> which makes having one of these on the network ideally the first step 
> for setting up a new hobbyist network.
> 
> And there are no licensing restrictions from using SimH/VAX Infoserver 
> in a commercial environment.  All the code is now Freeware.
> 
> Not only can the Infoserver serve the OpenVMS boot media as is, it can 
> also be used to serve re-mastered images with the hobbyist license keys 
> installed.
> 
> Link for running emulators in a libvirt-lxc container, which last worked 
> with Ubuntu 14.04.
> 
> https://sourceforge.net/p/vms-ports/wiki/SimH-VAX%20in%20a%20Container/
> 
> And what you need to know after you get the operating system installed 
> so that you can more easily maintain a collection of systems.
> 
> Introduction to the VMS Environment:
> https://sourceforge.net/p/vms-ports/wiki/IntroVMSEnvironment
> 
> VMS System management:
> https://sourceforge.net/p/vms-ports/wiki/VMSSystemManagement
> 
> Regards,
> -John
 

Infoserver on VAX on SIMH on ARM on Pi, via mostly Freeware, sounds 
like an interesting concept, but is there a particular reason RPi 2 
or 3 are of interest?

I have Pi 2 and 3 somewhere but probably would not generally recommend 
them for new development where performance was important.

Raspberry Pi OS is still 32bit and still works on Pi 4 and Pi 400
(it's mostly Debian, as I understand it).

There is 64bit support in hardware in the newer Pi options, plus 
other enhancements such as improved IO (e.g. USB and network) throughput.
64bit OS support exists, but not yet in Raspberry Pi OS as such.

Are you familiar with the Raspberry Pi 4 compute module? From $25.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/raspberry-pi-compute-module-4-is-out-25-with-a-new-form-factor-and-new-connectors/
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/designing-the-raspberry-pi-compute-module-4/

Just wondering.