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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!"
I know it's present in some legacy systems, and supported by Compaq for that reason. But why would we want VMS on new hardware? What new stuff runs on VMS these days?
--
There is no hatred more pure and true than that expressed by children.
> but is OpenVMS really good for anything _new_ today?
The answer to your question is cultural rather than technical. VMS is a superb OS, but it is now viewed as déclassé in most circles, so it only has a thin slice of mindshare. That's not really any more a reflection on it than the thin slice of mindshare given to some very excellent programming languages.
I more than half wish the OSS revolution had centered around VMS rather than UNIX. There's not the slightest reason we couldn't be doing all the things we do under VMS... except the "price architecture". Put a free+open version on x86 and Linux might have some hot competition.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I grew up on VAX/VMS at school after a highschool exposure to (and part-time job thru the college years using) PDP-11s.
Compared to the various dialects of unix, the VMS environment was so much friendlier and forgiving... I'm only now realizing how much my hands were in mittens using it. I'd still prefer a system that wasn't so case-sensitive.
The chief engineers behind VMS then went to work at Micro$oft to develop NT, so some of the legacy is still there: expensive process starts, but a nice memory model to work with.
Strengths:
Linkers in the early 80s that were easy to cross languages in a single project
A powerful set of run-time libraries, including some excellent flatfile databases
A scripting language that had access to a nice library of "lexical" functions.
But like I said, I wish I still cared. While we still have Alphas around running openVMS at the office, I haven't logged onto one for about three years. Somewhere, I have a huge library of shell routines, login scripts, and ancient forms-oriented code.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I can believe that. My father has some planetary simulation program that can simulate a spacecraft flying between n-bodies. Its all numerical integration. He has a 166Mhz 21064 (AXP-PCI 133; ie oem alpha motherboard) with 64MB of ram (33Mhz). He also has a 850Mhz Duron with 256MB of DDR-266. The program runs at about 1/3 the speed of the duron on the alpha -- but that's with GCC which doesn't generate overly optimal code for the Alpha processor.
Its says a lot for that old Alpha machine. I bet those new Alphas which I'm assuming operate at least at 1Ghz, would be able to leave a P4 3Ghz in the dust for floating-point operations.
The Digital marketeers changed the name from VMS to OpenVMS when the OS got its POSIX branding. The funny thing is that VMS got it before most UNIX systems did.
In those days, there was a lot of fuzz among customers about the need to buy "open" systems and not "proprietary" ones, (meaning that VMS was proprietary and Solaris or HP-UX were open). That's why Digital felt POSIX branding was a good thing.
Then the customers bought lots of M$ Windows stuff instead; so much for wanting "open" systems!
Another fact: VMS came with source code from the start! On microfiche. Not so that you could recompile the OS, but rather learn about it, check bugs, etc.
)9TSS
Where I work, we use VMS. Sadly it's going away. But, I do have some really cool storie that my boss passed along to me about his experiences with VMS back in the 80s. He worked at a bank where they had a support group for the two different systems they supported. There was the Wang support group and the VMS support group. The Wang support group was made up of 100+ people who were on call 24/7 and were generally in the offices. The VMS support group was... 1 person. Also on call 24/7, but only ever needed to be there during normal work hours becasuse the system "just worked". I've seen the same thing where I work now. We are moving to HP's Unix and most of the VMS guys are dreading it. Even though I love UNIX and Linux, I have to say that VMS is a lot heartier and very easy to support. To be honest, if DEC/Compaq/HP had been smart, they could have had a great competitor to Windows in the server market if they kept the GUI up to date. Hopefully, someone will port Gnome to it and get it to have a bit more of a modern feel for the server monkeys.
Un-news
What exactly about OpenVMS makes it "open?" Is it a marketing slogan or is there more to it?
VMS is the worst operating system I have ever encountered, period.
It might have decent preemptive multitasking, but the entire premise of the OS was to deny users as many privileges as possible, thus ensuring systems people full-time employment.
I can still remember having to go and beg to have my disk allocation increased to 2 MB. VMS is one of the reasons PCs took off so quickly; at least with a PC, you don't have to go on your knees and beg for indulgence from a prick every couple of weeks to be able to be able to get anything done on your computer.
I remember working with Open VMS on Vaxen & later on Alphas. We wrote control systems that ran on them, gas, water, electricity distribution control systems.
Great I/O facilities built into the OS, gotta love that QIO system call.
By why use OpenVMS ? Well its as solid as they come, easy to secure, great documentation.
Its a shame DEC/Compaq/HP/Whoever owns it this week won't take on M$ in the server arena with it.
Remember the iAPX 432? A message-passing architecture implemented in hardware, with every function living in its own privilege ring. You could do that machine right today. And you wouldn't have to use ADA to do it. Someone should make more new silicon in this direction. IA64 goes a little bit in this direction, but it's too easy for operating systems and compilers to not use its capabilities in the name of portability. With the '432, there was never any possibility of the OS running on anything else.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Certainly didn't dissapoint me, toasting my bread with an Athlon...
I've seen an Athlon physically melt the solder connections of a motherboard (mine, sadly). Something must've caused the fan to seize momentarily -- then the building I was in had a fire drill -- nothing wrong at all, just a test of the system... I was away about 5 minutes. Walk back to my computer, and notice the odd smell. Turn off the power immediately; open the case... The heat from the Athlon had melted the CPU fan into the CPU heatsink. The (copper) heatsink was quite discolored due to heat. I made the mistake of brushing my hand against the heatsink after I powered the thing off... (but before noticing that it was the melted fan that smelled so awful). It took weeks for the burn to heal; the act of pulling my hand away jarred the case slightly, and a couple of the toroidal cores slid out of their holes (the solder had melted) And, what's more: There were all these surface-mount components oozing downward (with gravity).
Absolutely no overclocking or tweaking was involved.
The thing I couldn't help but think was how close the fire 'drill' had come to being an actual fire... At least everyone was out of the building... All thanks to the nice, cool-running nature of the AMD Athlon.
Interesting note: The AMD Athlon pulls ~75 W of power. The average soldering iron pulls 15-30W. Pentiums aren't much better than the Athlon... Is it any wonder that many people are using these tornado cases, or liquid cooling? That's a lot of heat to be dissipating!
Interesting note II: I replaced that first Athlon with a second one.
Interesting note III: The second Athlon died (not by heat, however) under a year later.
Interesting note IV: I have yet another Athlon, which is getting close to the 6-month mark... Here's hoping it makes it to a full year!!!
Interesting note V: My next computer is going to be a Mac.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
And you could buy a source license for the OS as well so you could modify the OS if you had sufficient skill.
Much of VMS was written in BLISS-32 whose back-end produced fantastic code - sure it was code no human being would have written - but damn good code just the same.
Being able to pull out the microfiche and check out the BLISS source was often useful when learning to program deep into the OS.
Not to mention the DECUS meetings where you could talk to the developers. I can remember the meeting in LA when at a small session DEC and the guys from MIT revealed the 782 - assymmetric multi-processing. It was exciting stuff. DEC had some really good engineers.
Remember - the VAX was about the ultimate CISC processor. Memory was scarce in those days - having 64MB of RAM was a big deal! The processor was very efficient in the use of memory.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
With the original VAX architecture, there were four privilege rings. You had the usual user space and kernel space. You had exec space which was used by RMS (Record Management System) and allowed it to do complicated things like cross user buffer sychronisation, securely but outside the kernel. It was also used by some of the Digital database systems. The other mode, supervisor, was for the command intrepreter. VMS fully used all these special facilityies which made it non-trivial to port to other architecture (they tried initially to go to MIPS, but that failed).
See my journal, I write things there
The logical names, of course!
$ define thefile test:thefile.dat
$ run myprogram
$ ! Do some testing
$ define thefile production:thefile.dat
$ run myprogram
$ ! Do some work...
I really miss that...