[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Monday, October 11, 2021 at 1:30:36 AM UTC+13, chris wrote:
>
> On 10/10/21 01:12, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
>>
>> The key point is that VMS shied away from a radical idea that Unix embraced:
>> that the filesystem itself should abstract away the need for blocking and
>> deblocking, and offer up a file as just a stream of n bytes, with no requirement
>> on n being a multiple of any integer greater than 1.
>>
> Yes, and at the lowest level, it's completely transparent to data and 
> it's format. Filesystems, structure and format should be layered in top 
> of that. Obvious really... 

Which brings us to a point I’ve made before: the Linux kernel already runs on every architecture that VMS users and developers might care about, now and into the future. It already has a range of drivers for common (and not-so-common) hardware, including that in enterprise use. It includes a robust, high-performance TCP/IP stack.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just keep the parts of VMS that users and developers need, and implement them as a compatibility layer on top of a Linux kernel? And just scrap the rest. Wouldn’t that save a lot of effort?