[Info-vax] VSI Community License Program - x86

[Andrew Back]

On Sunday, 16 April 2023 at 04:19:03 UTC+1, Mark Berryman wrote:
> On 4/15/23 1:07 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote: 
> > On 4/15/2023 11:17 AM, Chris Townley wrote: 
> >> On 15/04/2023 16:10, Scott Dorsey wrote: 
> >>> John H Reinhardt  <johnhre... at thereinhardts.org> wrote: 
> >>>> Robert Brooks and others (I think) have in past times stated 
> >>>> repeatedly that a Gen 9 or later HP Proliant will be required for 
> >>>> bare metal.  Since the CPU characteristics are usually propagated 
> >>>> through by the VM hypervisor, that would seem to mean that VM Hosts 
> >>>> must be Gen 9 or higher as well, but I'm just guessing at that.. 
> >>> 
> >>> Oh no, I know folks who are running a test VM server on some junk 
> >>> Optiplex 
> >>> that's more than a decade old, and it's slow but working.  I am guessing 
> >>> it's a matter of driver support if it really does require the Gen 9. 
> >> 
> >> The advice from VSI was fairly woolly: 
> >> 
> >>      Most Intel CPUs from 2016 and later support these processor features 
> > 
> > I thougth VSI recommended running vmscheck.py to verify if the 
> > CPU will do?
> I do not believe the issue is CPU related. My understanding is that it 
> is only Gen 9 and later that use UEFI. Previous generations are 
> apparently BIOS based. VMS requires UEFI. 

In that case I should think you could run it on earlier than Gen 9, albeit via Qemu + KVM, where the virtual machine is configured to use OVMF bios (TianoCore UEFI port).

Interesting also to see someone has had bare metal success with an Asus mainboard. Has me wondering how much effort would be involved in porting the AMDgpu open source driver, plus others as required, to get OpenVMS up and running on a modern laptop.

Andrew