[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Saturday, October 16, 2021 at 4:38:37 AM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 10/14/2021 10:10 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
>> On Friday, October 15, 2021 at 2:36:27 PM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote: 
>>> On 10/14/2021 9:11 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
>>>> And VMS can do the same thing. All the compatibility stuff can live in userland. 
>>> 
>>> I am having a hard time seeing: VMS scheduling, VMS memory protection, 
>>> VMS clustering, ... 
>> 
>> None of which are relevant, because Linux already offers better functionality
>> in all those areas.
>> All of which are relevant, because without them it would not be VMS.

Let us be clear what I’m getting at here: I’m not interested in curating a museum piece. I thought the important goal would be to allow existing user-mode code to run unchanged (as far as possible), and also existing DCL command procedures to run unchanged as far as possible. Everything else can go back to the museum. So what we want out of our compatibility layer is for it to look enough like VMS to satisfy those goals, even while its internals are entirely Linux-based.

> DECnet is a bit possessive with NIC's - first thing it does is to change 
> the MAC address.

I know. It’s even more primitive than AppleTalk, it doesn’t have an ARP layer. So instead it has to compute the MAC address from the protocol address.

But we can cope with that.

>> Unneeded, since Linux already has the needed device drivers.
> Not enough for existing code and scripts to work.

I don’t care about anything beyond user mode (see above). I don’t think any of that is worth the effort.