[Info-vax] clock problems with OpenVMS x86 on VirtualBox

[terry-...@glaver.org]

On Monday, May 8, 2023 at 2:56:05 PM UTC-4, bill wrote:
> I guess I'm just to subtle. I certainly didn't mean for VSI to re- 
> invent the wheel yet again. I meant that they should [ick up one of 
> these existing emulators (SIMH for the VAX) do a port for VMS (if 
> it doesn't already exist) and then bundle them with VMS-x86_64. 
> IMHO a reasonable alternative to the VEST idea. I am sure any VAX 
> emulation will be faster than the fastest hardware VAX ever built. 
> Alpha, I couldn't say.

IMH expects to be running operating systems (at least in the VAX
case). It might need substantial changes to its design to provide
only instruction emulation and to simply produce calls to equivalent
x86-64 VMS functions.

If you just mean running a complete VAX/VMS environment, since
x86-64 VMS already runs under a hypervisor it would probably be
better to just run vanilla SIMH as another VM. If VSI ever releases
a "cluster compatibility kit" for VAX/VMS, it could even be a poten-
tially-supported cluster environment.

There is also the issue that some / many (I don't have that info, but
I assume VSI has some idea) VAX customers are still on VAX due
to dependency on [semi-]custom hardware. With the small number
of VMS customers I'm familiar with, VAX -> Alpha was usually "We
can't" while Alpha -> Itanium was "We won't".