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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mechanicjay on Friday April 21 2017, @04:22AM (1 child)
Well, one of the things with VMS is it's really a mid-70's product, and a direct decendent of RSX-11 for the PDP-11 series of computers..and it shows. It was fairly well modernized through the 90's however, until DEC went tits-up. Then it became part of Compaq's portfolio, who, being a hardware company, had no idea what to do with it. Then quickly it became HP's product, where it competed against their own in-house proprietary OS's. So, it was basically left to languish by the year 2000. The port to Itanium never really went anywhere, as performance on Itainum, until the most recent iteration was basically barely on par with the old Alpha servers. Anyway, as to your design questions:
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 21 2017, @06:55AM
How is memory management? ie where a memory section in your process memory may be fragmented to just about anywhere in physical memory or even disc blocks.
What makes it possible to migrate nodes? it must both transfer memory and instruction pointer, register setting, processor mode, device state etc and then there's multiprocessing. So it must more or less stop a processor, save all status to a communication line, verify and continue on another node. A lot of atomic operation issues and consistency. Though a modified scheduler on Unix should maybe be able to do the same?
(I'm thinking this has some similarities to the "Freezer" cartridges in the past)
Can a user mount their own filesystem, that only they can access? (like on Hurd) as for the rest it seems VMS more or less deals with the filesystem as a SQL database. Every storage object is a SQL row or similar paradigm.