[HN Gopher] Porting OpenVMS from VAX to Alpha AXP (1992) [pdf]
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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.
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