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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-05-26 18:38:06 +0000, arca... at gmail.com said:

> On Wednesday, 26 May 2021 at 16:33:54 UTC+1, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> If this is a production project,
> If this is production, then I'm doing something illegal ... or maybe 
> OpenVMS licensing has moved on. I'm not aware of any way to legally run 
> OpenVMS on SIMH. I guess HP *could* issue a commercial licence for 
> SIMH, but I'd be pretty surprised if they ever had!

OpenVMS licensing moved on most of twenty years ago, and emulators can 
be licensed for production, and have been.  I'm aware of both VAX and 
Alpha emulators in production, fully licensed.

For an early announcement of this: 
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.vms/c/hjBdPuum290/m/mTre9M-FO1oJ

>> As for your testing assumptions, ~nobody back then was looking for 
>> these sorts of issues,
> I'm just surprised that the size was supported without any testing at 
> all. 4GB was common back then and 8GB existed. Just one further 
> doubling would have come close to hitting this issue (assuming it is 
> real and not just something sent to try me).

I'm just surprised you think the 100 GB size was supported back then. 
It's certainly within the theoretical range for the ODS-2 design, but 
the HDD device support back then was a whole lot less than 100 GB.

IDE/ATAPI/PATA device support hasn't gotten anywhere near 1 TiB or 2 
TiB, either. DQDRIVER—other than a test driver I'd reworked and 
prototyped—was still using 24-bit addressing when last I checked.


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