[Info-vax] How much of VMS is still in MACRO-32?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/30/2021 4:59 AM, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <s8ubjp$4ei$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, arne at vajhoej.dk (Arne Vajhøj)
> wrote:
>> Why separate?
>>
>> It is common in *nix world to distinguish between kernel and
>> userland.
>>
>> But not sure that it makes much sense on VMS:
>> * both were developed by DEC
>> * both were developed in the same languages
>> * they have always been consider a single entity
> 
> The reason for distinguishing, now that I've thought about it a bit more,
> is that the kernel, some device drivers, the loader and so on need to be
> able to deal with 64-bit addresses, memory above the 4GB line, and so on.
> That isn't something that MACRO-32 does natively. In contrast, some of
> the utility programs can probably remain 32-bit forever, so there's less
> need to revise them.

Whatever changes necessary to support 64 bit was done 30 years ago
for Alpha.

Arne