[Info-vax] Greater than approx 16GB disk leads to UNXSIGNAL crash

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-06-01, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
>
> OpenVMS Development never prioritized the addition of partitioning 
> support. That, and this case involves a very old and under-patched and 
> buggy OpenVMS VAX version. Retro-computing almost inherently involves 
> revisiting old bugs.
>

It would be nice to have proper partition support on VMS, with multiple
bootable partitions as well.

> More recent OpenVMS has a hideously ugly partitioning hack commonly 
> found on OpenVMS I64 and specifically for Itanium EFI support, and that 
> hack is solely intended to present what OpenVMS expects (one big 
> volume) and what EFI expects (GPT partitioning) and without allowing 
> partition-aware tools to easily corrupt the OpenVMS one-big-volume view 
> of the storage.  Silent console-triggered corruptions were once 
> possible here with older EFI firmware too, when the expectations of the 
> firmware and of OpenVMS diverged.
>

I wonder if we are heading towards a modern version of the various
WRITEBOOT issues and "fun" that sometimes happened in the old days... :-)

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.