[Info-vax] openvms and xterm

[David Goodwin]

In article <v1cjv2$343as$1 at dont-email.me>, ldo at nz.invalid says...
> 
> On Mon, 6 May 2024 16:28:12 +1200, David Goodwin wrote:
> 
> > Why does Unix need a text file to store information about mount points?
> 
> Linux does not need a text file to store information about mount points.
> 
> > Been a long time since I've seen PowerPC or MIPS PCs on store shelves...
> 
> They are used in computers, just because the stores you frequent don?t 
> carry them, is merely a reflection on the kinds of stores you frequent.

Care to name some widely available MIPS or PowerPC desktop computers 
that a significant number of people/companies are likely to be 
interested in paying to run Windows on?

> > The PowerPC port ended when IBM stopped including ARC-compatible
> > firmware on new machines.
> 
> It didn?t stop Linux from continuing to support POWER, though.
>
> > The MIPS port ended when you could no longer
> > buy MIPS workstations with ARC firmware.
> 
> So Windows needed some special handholding to run on non-x86 
> architectures, where Linux was able to operate without such training 
> wheels.

Please don't be absurd. Special hand-holding? I'm really not sure how 
you think Windows NT has more special hand-holding than Linux here. 
Delete all the "special handholding" OpenFirmware support code from the 
linux kernel and see how well it boots on a SPARCstation.

Linux has "special hand-holding" to support a bunch of random firmware 
implementations. Most of it was developed by people in their spare time, 
or in some cases sponsored by the hardware vendor.

Windows NT has/had had "special hand-holding" to support three kinds of 
firmware: ARC, the PC BIOS and (U)EFI. These are all variously open-
standards - if you wanted to sell PowerPC hardware in the 90s that ran 
NT you just needed either ARC-compatible firmware, or some shim that 
provides an ARC-compatible interface (this is what IBM did on some 
machines). Depending the design of the machine you may also need to 
supply a HAL DLL.

This is a reasonable choice when you're a company that is after some 
kind of return on investment. No point spending a pile of money adding 
support for booting from OpenFirmware if Sun is never going to offer 
Windows as an option on a brand new SPARCstation and the number of 
people who would buy Windows and install it themselves is near zero. 
That would just be a waste of money.

> > Microsoft could have taken on supporting these platforms with whatever
> > random firmware they have like Linux does. But Microsoft is selling a
> > product here ...
> 
> Funny, isn?t it. The Linux kernel project has maybe 1000 regular 
> contributors. Microsoft has not one, but close to two orders of magnitude 
> greater developer talent on its payroll. Yet those Linux developers are 
> managing to support about *two dozen* major processor architectures, while 
> Microsoft struggles to get beyond one.

Companies exist to make money. You don't make money by developing a 
product no one will buy no matter how cheap or easy that product is to 
develop. That is how you loose money which is the *opposite* of what 
most companies aim to do.

Its really not that hard.

So, I we've arrived at: Windows is plenty portable and not all that 
difficult to port. But Microsoft only ports it to and maintains it for 
platforms where they think they'll make money because *thats what 
companies do*. The various people contributing to Linux have different 
objectives and are not necessarily looking for a return on investment.

> > None of them ran into technical problems.
> 
> I didn?t say they did. But they were just too expensive and difficult to 
> maintain. Windows simply wasn?t designed to make this sort of thing easy.

See previous answers. Lack of desire to waste money does not imply it is 
expensive or difficult to port, or that it was not designed to be 
portable. It just means that the people in charge don't feel like 
wasting time and money.

Given that we've got to the point where you're pretending you don't know 
how companies work to try and prove Windows isn't portable despite the 
number of CPUs its already been ported to I don't think there is any 
point in discussing its portability any further.

> > Would be interested to see Linux using fat32 as the root filesystem.
> > Last I checked it wasn't possible due to missing features in that
> > filesystem.
> 
> Linux will boot off any filesystem that GRUB will read.
> <https://askubuntu.com/questions/938076/install-boot-on-fat32-partition>

I didn't ask if it would boot off of a FAT32 filesystem. I asked if it 
could run with a FAT32 root filesystem (/). No disk images hiding other 
filesystems. No other filesystems complied into the kernel at all - just 
FAT and nothing but FAT. How does the VFS layer handle the complete lack 
of symlinks or hard links? How does the VFS layer handle the complete 
lack of security? Or POSIX filenames?

I presume it doesn't because its not really a use case worth writing and 
maintaining a pile of code to support.