[Info-vax] What would be involved in moving RMS into kernel mode ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2023-05-10, Jan-Erik Söderholm <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:
>
> But my main point was that "production ready" can mean very different
> things for different environment and users. It might not as simple as
> Simon seems to belive.
>

Actually, that's not true. "Production-ready" means exactly one thing,
especially for the kinds of people using VMS:

that the product in question is considered to be finished and has been
through such a robust testing process that you are now willing to trust
the future of your organisation and your organisation's data with it.

There's no way that x86-64 VMS, at this point in its lifecycle, can
meet those criteria, although hopefully that will change rapidly in
the not too distant future.

For one thing, x86-64 VMS is still built using non-optimised compilers.

Any person with any experience elsewhere of the implications of that,
should be asking how many bugs and other issues will emerge once VMS is
built using optimised compilers ?

The good news is that once VMS is built with those compilers, any issues
should be identified and fixed rather quickly. That doesn't change the
fact that VMS still needs to go through this process as a prerequisite to
being considered production-ready.

For another thing, only now are the core layered products starting to
emerge, and they need to go through a couple of cycles to make sure any
basic issues are ironed out. Once again, the good news is that once that
process starts, those issues should be ironed out rather quickly, but
they still need to go through that process. Look at the current basic
issues being reported around the debugger in another thread for example.

x86-64 VMS is well on the road to being production-ready, but IMHO it
isn't there yet.

Simon.

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