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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Or 2018 if you're brave. For now, we have a boot screen!
Story's a bit dated but being as they're in no rush, I don't see any need for us to be either. So, you lot think we'll ever actually get to play with a VMS box on cheap hardware or is this going to be another DNF situation?
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/13/openvms_moves_slowly_towards_x86/
Previous coverage:
OpenVMS Not Yet Dead.
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VMS Will be Ready to Run on x86 in 2019!
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You humans are all alike.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Thursday April 20 2017, @11:15AM (17 children)
OpenVMS is one of those platforms I actually admire for being rock solid and having a lot of nifty things that *nix doesn't, but mainframes do like versioned filesystems. I actually have an Itanium system, but the pain of getting hobbyist PAKs for it has left me in the case most of my VMS investigations is mostly reading articles about it, and occasionally using one.
Unfortunately, OVMS on x86 is about six years too late to be relevant. When they got stuck on the Itanium tarpit, a lot of places decided to jump ship due to cost, and with it, most of the ISVs that supported it. Without that install base, I don't think VMS has enough traction to be relevant because it had a good niche between "Linux stability" and "NonStop/Stratus VOS's never fail" for corporations that wanted a very sane and stable platform, but needed more features than NonStop could provide. There are a few cases where I considered OpenVMS for a client's needs, but the cost of hardware + lack of support ultimately had them go to AIX or a Linux distribution.
Still always moving
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @11:57AM (3 children)
If they really wanted to compete, the way to draw vendors back would be to make it an open(ish) platform, get it on as much different hardware as possible, then tout the features that make it rock solid and thus competitive against linux, unix, and windows.
But instead they still keep up the stupid facade that proprietary software that has long since fallen out of relevance is financially valuable as IP.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @04:17PM (2 children)
They renamed VMS to OpenVMS.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:37PM (1 child)
It says "open" on the tin but it's not really open source. If you believe what random people on the Internet say:
https://community.hpe.com/t5/General/what-does-it-mean-OpenVMS/td-p/3265043 [hpe.com]
Not quite. POSIX had already been around for several years/releases. The "Open" prefix was added in an effort to state that although "proprietary", VMS was "Open" in the sense it compiled with virtually all recognised standards and would talk to just about anything. POSIX was part of the story, but certainly not the whole reason.
OpenVMS also means you can get the source listings easily for one or two $K. Try doing that with the AS400 and some other OSes; if you as a system admin can get them at all, it won't be easy.
"OpenVMS" means, "come look at me and see how I work." For a proprietary operating system, that is pretty amazing.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 21 2017, @02:27AM
Easily for one or two $K also mean few people will just download it to explore on a Saturday. And because of that the next step won't come to existence.
(Score: 5, Funny) by TheRaven on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:05PM (7 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NCommander on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:18PM (6 children)
You're thinking segmenting that died with x86_64. Rings survived (and are still used in some cases)
Modern x86 has five or six rings depending on how you look at it.
Ring -2 (SMM)
Ring -1 (vmx/vmd)
Ring 0 (kernel space)
Ring 1-2 (drivers, theoretically)
Ring 3 (userspace)
Still always moving
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:33PM (5 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:09PM (4 children)
Can you cite sources for ring 1-2 not being usable on x86_64? I googled for it but found nothing.
Also, I used to develop firmware :)
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2017, @09:07AM (1 child)
I think parent is mistaken:
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch10.html#idm9820 [virtualbox.org]
For guest code in ring 0, VirtualBox employs a nasty trick: it actually reconfigures the guest so that its ring-0 code is run in ring 1 instead (which is normally not used in x86 operating systems). As a result, when guest ring-0 code (actually running in ring 1) such as a guest device driver attempts to write to an I/O register or execute a privileged instruction, the VirtualBox hypervisor in "real" ring 0 can take over.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday April 21 2017, @01:53PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday April 21 2017, @02:02PM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday April 21 2017, @11:59PM
Huh. I actually have found contradictory information when I went looking . Xen's security post suggests the IRET mechanism is there and the Priv spot is still present in the GDT selector. [xenproject.org]
INT/IRET on 64-bit use the 64-bit IDT format which has a spot for the code selector in the GDT you can land in, and you can still setup multiple GDT entries in place. Won't having a specific entry in the GDT at Priv 1-2, and setting the sector via IDT give you an interrupt call which would pop you into the Ring 1-2?
I may have to break out the assembler to experiment.
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:39PM (3 children)
VAX's ability to do detailed security allowances by file/command was interesting and powerful, but boy, can it be abused by the clueless!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 21 2017, @02:44AM (2 children)
Systems run by clueless people will always be a disadvantage to whoever has to endure them. The problem is clueless people, not software. Which in the modern era is solved by that even a handheld phone has more computing power than a early 1990s supercomputer (8*10^9 op/s).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 21 2017, @02:53PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 21 2017, @03:16PM
So true, no default micromanagement capability. Thwarting incompetence since dawn of mankind.. ;)
(Score: 2, Informative) by mechanicjay on Thursday April 20 2017, @11:12PM
but the pain of getting hobbyist PAKs for it has left me in the case most of my VMS investigations is mostly reading articles about it, and occasionally using one.
Dude, it takes like 10 minutes to get hobbyist PAKs.
Once you get that, a nice gentleman from HP will even offer you an FTP download of install media.
Note: the hobbyist situation for VMS on amd64 is still an unknown.
--Jason
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.