[Info-vax] report of the last "rendez-vous autour de VMS" (2-FEB-2024)

[John Dallman]

In article <uvptfj$2126r$2 at dont-email.me>, ldo at nz.invalid (Lawrence
D'Oliveiro) wrote:

> Just in time for x86 to no longer be quite at the forefront of 
> server computing, or even computing generally. ARM is having more 
> of a presence, and RISC-V is not far behind.

x86 is still running a vast majority of server workloads, and
organisation that are running VMS tend to be conservative. Also, when the
x86 port started, Aarch64 was way too new to depend on for a server OS
and RISC-V was in its infancy. 

It's still the case that there is a very limited range of Aarch64 server
hardware available for on-premises use, and virtualisation for it is
pretty new. I've been porting and building software for Aarch64 Linux for
a few years, and the ecosystem is nowhere near as mature as x86. 

As for RISC-V, who is offering RISC-V 64-bit servers or cloud instances
as of now? I count Scaleway, since early March, but they're bare metal
servers, *not* Linux ready to run. RISC-V has a lot of hype, somewhat
questionable potential, and not very much in service that's suitable for
VMS. 

John