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First OpenVMS Boot On IA64
vaxzilla writes "At 3:31pm EST on Friday, January 31st, 2003,
OpenVMS for the Intel IA64
architecture
successfully booted and ran a DIR command.
The Intel Itanium family of processors is the third architecture supported
by OpenVMS in its
25 year
history. Originally it ran on Digital Equipment Corporation VAX
systems; in the early 1990s, support was added for the DEC Alpha
processors. Following the acquisition of DEC by Compaq, and more recently
Compaq by HP, the Itanium and Itanium2 port of OpenVMS is now being
undertaken by HP. Congratulations on a job well done to the folks at
ZK03 in Nashua, NH!"
Would it help with graphics applications?
No, graphics would use vector operations, which use 64-bit vectors but are not called "64-bit" operations. A "64-bit" operation is typically defined as one that uses a 64-bit number or a 64-bit pointer, not a vector of four 16-bit numbers. Current 32-bit processors are perfectly capable of performing operations on vectors of 16-bit numbers through such instruction set extensions as 3DNow! and AltiVec.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Specifically, open in the sense that it complies to POSIX standards.
I must disagree with you.
64 bit does not mean a thing.
It means something important to anybody who ever has to receive a CAT scan or a nMRI scan... VMS/VAX systems run nMRI and CAT scanners... They use 64 bit architecture during Fourier analysis...
99.99999999999999% of software today does NOT run on it
probably because 99% of software today is used for text and graphics processing; not for mission critical apps. that's kind of like saying that 99% of all driving accidents happen within 25 miles of home... well, geeze, 99% of all driving period occurs within 25 miles of home...
performance difference in mhz between 32 bit and 64 bit processors (especially in the north bridge) makes any performance gained by using 64 bit architecture negligible
I disagree with you. The difference between being able to handle 2^32 and 2^64 is worlds apart in performance. I suggest that you compare 16 bit computers, which didn't support true-color, full motion multimedia, and compare to 32 bit computers. They both support text editing; however, one supports WYSIWYG better than the other...
FYI, my day job involves running MRI scans on a VMS/VAX Gyroscan Intera workstation... This 64 bit architecture is the hottest stuff around, for somebody who works with a VMS/VAX workstation... here's why: MRI scanners work just like any other printer/scanner device, in terms of device drivers, and general operation. The difficulty is, because MRI looks at differential angular momentum of hydrogen atoms to obtain it's pictures, it's got to calculate a Fourier wave analysis on each atom it vibrates. Being able to run an algorithm with 64 bits means less data manipulation, higher resolution, faster scan times, and increased diagnostic imaging power to the medical doctors.
Anyhow, for those interested, there currently seems to be a big migration from VMS/VAX/Alpha solutions to Windows/Intel compatibility (for obvious reasons). Philips has introduced an InteraNT product into their Intera Gyroscan line, which runs the MRI scanner on a Windows NT platform, instead of the traditional VMS/VAX platform which they've been using for some time...
As usual, great tool for the server companies, crap for everyone else in the world.
This is slashdot... they cover stuff which is great for server companies, hospital radiology departments, nuclear power facilities, astronautical engineering groups, etc. etc. That's why we love it...
automatic file versioning!
if you have foo.txt and you save another foo.txt in the same directory, you get foo.txt;2 !
damn, i wish Windows had that.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Yes you're correct with IA32 you're limited to 4GB per process. I wouldn't call it a "kludge"; basically you have 36 bits to specify a physical address in each PTE, but are still limited to 32 bit linear addressing. This means you can have 2^36 bytes of RAM, and processes can be spread out throughout that whole address space. I'd only consider it to be a kludge if there were "windows" or "partitions" and you could access 4GB of consecutive at once.
Note that this is completely transparent to the process. The OS is responsible for setting up paging. Note also that on a server you typically run a whole lot of processes anyways (e.g. a whole bunch of web server processes) so for most server applications I don't see it as a major limitation (big databases may be one problem)
Note also that theoretically that you could have system where the process could access more than 4GB of linear address space, if you set aside some region of linear address space for this purpose, and had a system call to update where this was going to. This is an ugly, ugly kludge, requires OS modification, and reminds of DOS style memory management but could be done (and would probably be cheaper than moving off of X86...)
Well, I just happened to have these links lying around, as I work on VMS/VAX systems at work (Gyroscan Intera system). These links are sort of the OpenVMS equivalent of gnu.org, gnome.org, redhat.com, and so forth...
n vms_roadmaps.htm
Core OpenVMS
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/
OpenVMS Future Release Contents, Schedules
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/roadmap/ope
OpenVMS and Core Layered Product Documentation
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/doc/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/commercial/
Core OpenVMS Support Search Engine URLs, FTP Patch Area http://askq.compaq.com/
http://ftp.digital.com.au/pub/ecoinfo/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/axp/...
The OpenVMS Freeware
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/freeware/
Encompas
http://www.encompassus.org/
Tech Help OpenVMS
http://askq.compaq.com/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/wizard/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...
Yep -- wonderful, reliable, dependable clustering. VMS does clustering like no other operating system that I've ever seen, and it's been doing it for ages.
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
Too late they realized that they had forgotten to implement a shutdown command or even a copy command and the filesystem was corrupted when they turned the power off
Hello!??! This is VMS we are talking about. The filesystem is not corrupted on power failure.
)9TSS
> Well...considering the heat which Intel processors tend to generate...
Funny? Perhaps it was missed sarcasm on my part. While we're at it, maybe we could also use an Athlon processor to keep our beer cold while we watch forthcoming "Itanium 2 powers your eBusiness" commercials?
You must have C3 or Motorola on your desktop. Tell me this: Does your processor underclock itself when it detects it's overheating due to a failed CPU fan?
From the perspective of a user in a mis-managed VMS environment, I can understand your sentiment, but it was your sysadmins who were at fault, not VMS.
The fact that VMS HAS options which allow extremely fine-grained selection of user privs is a positive thing about the OS. VMS also had all kinds of login security years (break-in detection and evasion) before other systems, and was designated "trusted" quite early on.
VMS could be mismanaged so that it would crash, if ALL logging options were enabled. But that doesn't make it bad for it to have had so many different logging options.
Diskquotas weren't even enabled by default when I was using VMS. You *could* enable them (and obviously your silly sysadmins both enabled them and put very low limits on you), but you never had to.
VMS is a very flexible tool, and tools can be made to do lots of things, some good, some bad.
By the way, even now there aren't that many systems with the availability and redundancy VMS clusters had in 1985 (automatic failover from one machine to another, separate shared disk controllers, etc. etc.).
Finally VAX/VMS virtual memory worked better than any other such system I've seen. You could actually let things page and they didn't slow down much, since the paging was so intelligent.
*sigh* anyway, that was all a long time ago. I haven't used VMS professionally since 1992 or so...
And since a VMS cluster can be fully upgraded automaticaly without any downtime to the cluster as a whole, the system can be continuely upgraded with no downtime to the users.
OpenVMS's clustering is the reason why most VMS users think that it's so cool. Think about it - 15 years of uptime. That's insane.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Regarding your claim that VMS is optimized for Fourier wave analysis, I can't believe that this is unique today. The main impetus behind VAX BSD was ARPA's desire to have a Unix system that would handle the memory demands of computer graphics. We made use of various Unix systems at Pixar and Pixar's predecessors, where there were similar sorts of problems (texture rendering rather than FFT) and Linux is now the darling of those places.
This is a VM and cache issue, not really rocket science these days.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference - - the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.
Ken Olsen, Chmn&CEO, DEC, 1984
Use the right hardware, and yes, it does. (I believe that OpenVMS also supports removing a processor by automatically moving any processes running on that processor to a new processor with no data loss. I forget if you need to tell OpenVMS to "turn off" the processor or if you can just pop it out. I think certain combos of VMS and hardware allow true hotswapping, where the CPU can just be plucked out with no loss to the OS.)
With clustering, you can add new computers to the cluster. Therefore, the cluster does not run on continuously 15-year old CPUs. You take a computer out of the cluster, upgrade the computer, and reinsert. (Or, more likely, get a new, more powerful computer, add it to the cluster, and retire a computer that's due to be removed.)
Therefore, the cluster itself stays running 24/7 with no downtime, and the individual computers in it can be upgraded over time.
So no, an OpenVMS cluster with an uptime of 15 years is not running on 15-year-old hardware or running a 15-year-old OS - it can be continuely upgraded throughout its life. And, generally, it is.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I uses/run a public OpenVMS cluster. There are still somethings that the Unix community could learn from OpenVMS. Cluster, and the security model come to mind. The stablity cannot be beat. It's good stuff. And, yes.. You can run OpenVMS on your little Intel boxes.. Check out.. http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ .. Cool stuff.
Run's great. If you're really interested in OpenVMS, there's a couple of "free access" servers out there. For example:
http://deathrow.vistech.net .... One uVAX, and
Alpha online for public use. We're about to add a SIMH (Intel) box running OpenVMS into the cluster as well.
Certain models of VAX hardware were fault-tolerant and had more than one CPU (usually three); the CPUs would "vote" by running the same code and comparing results. If two CPUs agreed and one didn't, the one that didn't was marked faulty, and a message was sent to the operator.
The future was ten years ago; now it's just in syndication.
:: "I am non-refutable." --Enik the Altrusian ::
The level of security in VMS is what keeps it in circulation. I work for a major european bank and we use VMS for all of the major banking systems (except websites - they use Oracle and ftp their files to VAX - which is just about the only regular problem we have to deal with).
The fact that we can lock the system down as much as we do is why it hasn't been replaced by more "fashonable" OS's
"My parents were strict, but they never pitted me against livestock" - Doug Stanhope
Announcement on GNAT for ia64/OpenVMS on 14Mar2002
This is great and it's the right thing to do!
Laurent