[Info-vax] relaunch or legacy

[John Dallman]

In article <st1eie$9b4$2 at dont-email.me>,
clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley) wrote:

> A system call translator might not be enough for VMS because, 
> unlike Linux, there are VMS applications that decide to directly 
> look at data cells in the process space instead of getting the 
> data via system services.

Oh, damn. That makes it a lot harder.

> There may be other issues due to the persistent process nature of 
> VMS, instead of the "create a process to run a single program and 
> then discard the process" nature of Linux. You wouldn't just be
> running a standalone user application, but would also have to 
> provide access to things like DCL services via sys$cli() support.

It starts to seem more and more like the IBM mainframe OSes. I was
startled when I found out how much reading from reserved memory locations
goes on in them, and horrified when I discovered how many levels of
overrides and memory remapping are applied. 

John