[HN Gopher] Porting OpenVMS from VAX to Alpha AXP (1992) [pdf] ___________________________________________________________________ Porting OpenVMS from VAX to Alpha AXP (1992) [pdf] Author : todsacerdoti Score : 28 points Date : 2021-06-01 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.hpl.hp.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.hpl.hp.com) | loph wrote: | I have sadly lost my copy of the Digital Technical Journal that | had this article, it was a All-Alpha issue, if I remember | correctly. | | The authors are not attributed at the beginning of the article, | but they are all named at the end. | johndoe0815 wrote: | The DTJ issues are available for download as PDF from | https://vmssoftware.com/resources/digital-technical-journal/ | | The OpenVMS porting article is indeed part of the Alpha AXP | Architecture and Systems Special Edition, DTJ Volume 4 No.4 | (1992). | nickt wrote: | VMS Software Inc. [1] are the custodian of (own, I suppose) VMS | these days. | | The exciting news in this space is that the x86 port of OpenVMS | is coming along nicely. While I've not used VMS in production | (apart from a few days at an, ahem, large British telco, where we | had to track down a retiree), I've always been fond of it and | have an Alphastation at home. VSI are also providing the hobbyist | license for OpenVMS for Itanium, Alpha and soon x86. After some | concern last year that it would go away it's nice to see them | doing this [2]. | | [1] https://vmssoftware.com/ [2] | https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/ | | [Edit: typo] | slownews45 wrote: | Side note. I worked on a systems implementation for medical | billing that moved from OpenVMS to a Java/IE only monstrosity. | | I've never missed a simple system so much. The impact on EVERY | professional (not just tech / accounting / it / billing) of | this switch was a monumental disaster. | | The old system just worked. Even better, it was very focused on | key data points (aka efficient). | | The new system was so complicated - to login you needed to get | through a weird web based VPN, then a second VPN thing for the | platform, then login to the system. All on 30 day password | rotation (three passwords to get in) and impossible to get | hardware tokens. All on an old version of IE and Java (yes, | constant java popups asking to update). We had to downgrade | machines to allow for connections. | | And the new system had been designed obviously by committee, so | endless repetitive questions that were variants on each other. | Literally 10's to 100's of additional fields to enter. Race, | national origin, ethnicity (some staff and even participants | don't know how these are all different!). I've never seen more | money spent for more frustration (I ended up leaving the space | entirely). | | By the end of the implementation I absolutely missed our green | screen system - all keyboard driven (so FAST even on older | machines), a single VPN and then a login to connect (we ran | latest Windows but had a terminal emulator connection to the | green screen - think Putty style). | johnklos wrote: | It's always interesting to see how they solved problems in the | '90s that people still don't seem to get today. | | Also, it's amazing to see an HP URL that works! | colinb wrote: | Hah. I have memories of being a grad hire working on this project | - mostly to fetch tea and follow the directions of my betters - | but still, it was an impressive thing to see. | | I sat next to a guy who worked on something called Jacket & Tie. | I don't remember which was which, but the essence of this was to | compile VAX32->Alpha assembly, then run that on a big ass VAX (an | 8000? It's been a while) that had loadable microcode(!) enabling | it to emulate a very very slow Alpha. I think I recall hearing | that the first successful boot to login prompt took ~24h on this | hardware. | | I ported the RAD50 6-bit character set library (so you could | handle 6 characters in a 36 bit word file produced by ancient | TOPS20 boxes from the Marlboro Computing Company), written in the | even deeper past by my then boss when he had been a | whippersnapper. It was in PL1 I think. | | I ported (i.e. changed the build files to target Alpha rather | than VAX32) the badblock utility, and tested it with an Alpha | work station, a SCSI floppy drive, a box full of unused 3 1/2 | disks, and a paperclip to scratch the surface of each one before | initializing it. | | I had some madly brilliant colleagues who ported millions of | lines of hand-tuned VAX32 assembly, a boatload of BLISS32, and | oddments of other languages. | | I used to have a numbered super-secret copy of the project plan | but I think it went in the dumpster decades ago. | | I had a terrible time, and left with my self-confidence shattered | having spent several years achieving not much, but watched some | astoundingly competent colleagues do amazing things at a time | when Intel's chips were topping out at 33MHz and Alphas were | planned for 1GHz. I wish I had made more use of my time there, | but boy, I'm glad I got to see some really top notch engineers at | play. | zoomablemind wrote: | For the end-users the transition from VAX to Alpha rhymed with | VEST, which was a command-line utility to produce an Alpha | native binary from its VAX original binary. When successful, | such image was considererd VESTed. In some (lucky) mismanaged | cases this would be the only way forward in absence of the | original source code. | | Similar process was in use during transition to IA and probably | to x86-64 now. | | Pure magic, indeed! | loph wrote: | I think an awful lot of the user-space utilities were VESTed, | I'm thinking about EDT and TPU and who knows what else? | | This might be the ancient ancestor of the technology that | Apple uses to run x86 binaries on their M1 ARM-based chips. | cokernel_hacker wrote: | There is this great document | (http://www.decus.de/events/alphamigration/vortraege/porting_...) | which details the efforts to go from Alpha to Itanium. | | What is notable about their Itanium efforts is that they chose to | use ELF and DWARF and their object file and debugging formats. I | think that this was actually quite important as it made it far | easier for the x86 port: LLVM has robust support for ELF & DWARF. | | I think another thing which helped is that they wrote more of | OpenVMS in C which avoided the need for an x86 PL/I compiler, | etc. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-06-01 23:01 UTC)