[Info-vax] Attn VSI employees: Viable full system Itanium emulator for VMS ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-02-16, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
> On 2022-02-16, John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
>> HPE seem to have started to produce something for HP-UX. They announced
>> in 2017 that they would provide a way to run HP-UX in containers on x86
>> Linux, which obviously requires some kind of emulation. They called this
>> "Portable HP-UX", sometimes abbreviated "P-UX".
>>
>><https://3000newswire.blogs.com/3000_newswire/2017/09/hpe-takes-on-water-a
>> fter-its-software-flip.html>
>>
>> This is a beta for it: 
>>
>> https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/project/c-ux-beta/
>>
>> The Administration Guide has the most information. However, it is dated
>> 2019, so it looks as if the project has died.
>>
>
> Interesting. That certainly looks like an Itanium full system emulator.
>
> It's a pity that it's HP-UX specific. I also note it's not available
> for download without a warranty/support contract unfortunately.
>

I've had some more thoughts about this and it _may_ end up being
a viable Itanium full system emulator for VSI to offer after all.

It looks more most of the HP-UX stuff is capturing the original system
configuration and moving the HP-UX installation over to the emulator
and as such is basically a layer on top of the full system emulator.

Could VSI provide their own VMS layer on top of the emulator to move
an Itanium system over to the emulator ?

While the documentation is explicit that "The emulation is tuned for
HP-UX 11i v3. This OS is the only guest OS supported by the P-UX virtual
machine.", I wonder how much additional work would be required to get
it to support VMS ?

Given that VSI are in partnership with HPE, perhaps VSI could get
access to the source code to find out how viable that could be ?

Can someone else offer their own opinion ?

Simon.

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