[Info-vax] OpenVMS Potential Platform of Interest: Intel NUCs

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/1/2022 7:31 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <t9ktg4$20e7o$1 at dont-email.me>,
> Stephen Hoffman  <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
>> Whether OpenVMS might boot on Apple silicon under UTM QEMU? Donno. Not
>> expecting a VSI OpenVMS native port to Armv9-A this decade, nor to
>> RISC-V next.
> 
> That seems short-sighted.  If I were VSI, I'd take the opportunity
> to support x86_64, Aarch64 and RISC-V as an opportunity to clean up
> and modernize the VMS source base and make it truly portable.  Each
> ISA could be supported under a hypervisor; VMS on bare metal seems
> like mostly a dead end.

VMS has just been ported to its fourth architecture. Not sure how
much portability the fifth and sixth will add.

But in the end it is about money. Porting to a new architecture
cost money - a lot of money (at least a lot of money for a company
the size of VSI). And the market for ARM and RISC-V servers are
still microscopic compared to x86-64. Difficult to see the
business case today. Could ARM and RISC-V servers become more
common in the future? Maybe! Would VMS customers be
interested in those? Maybe! If that happens then VSI would
need to evaluate if/when to port.

I don't think Hoff is ruling such ports out. But he knows
the current market situation and he knows that the VMS x86-64
port took 8 years (from announcement to the release of 9.2).

Arne