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

[Simon Clubley]

On 2023-05-09, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
> On 5/9/2023 8:06 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2023-05-07, Gary Sparkes <mokuba at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Friday, May 5, 2023 at 8:17:02?AM UTC-4, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>> It will be nice to get a proper production release of VMS so that we
>>>> know for sure, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen this
>>>> year. :-(
>>>> Simon.
>>>
>>> Isn't that what V9.2 is? :)
>> 
>> No. Regardless of what the VSI marketing division would have you believe.
>> 
>> VMS is not production-ready until it is built using the final optimised
>> compilers.
>
> That sounds like a weird criteria to me.
>
> Production readiness should not depend on where the
> software build and the level of optimization that is used.
>

$ set response/mode=good_natured

Spoken like a true Java person, who is completely isolated from
the underlying hardware and system-level code. :-)

For a more serious response: In an ideal world, it should not matter.
In the current real world, it most certainly does. Unfortunately.

> They key metric should be robustness. And based on
> what has been posted here and in VSI forum, then VMS 9.2
> is pretty solid. There are some reports about problems
> in DECWindows and development tools, but the core
> OS seems to be rock solid. I don't think I have seen anyone
> post about system crashes.
>

Unoptimised code can make invalid assumptions that are only revealed
when the code is run through an optimiser. Any such problems in VMS
should be discovered rather quickly however once compiled in optimised
mode. It's still a requirement for VMS to go through this process before
it can be considered to be production-ready however.

Simon.

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