How OpenVMS will port to Itanic

JUST ONE DAY after Compaq and Intel announced the deal of deals, an executive at the firm was telling a mass of customers about the wonder that was OpenVMS - and how easily portable it would be to the IA-64 family.

According to a document seen by the INQUIRER over the weekend, and presented to others at Sophia Antipolis on the 26th of June, OpenVMS is a touchstone of such promise that maybe Microsoft should just go away and start from scratch on their operating system again. [They just did you fool. Ed]

Open VMS "has never been in better shape", the document trilled, with version 7.3 "building on 20 years of experience while laying foundation for the next 20 years".

It repeated Compaq CEO Mike Capellas' line on the 25th, saying that "the continued support and expansion of Open VMS remains critical -- not only to our customers but to Compaq".

And here's the evidence. OpenVMS is number one in Healthcare, is involved in 90 per cent of the manufacturing of CPUs, is responsible for 50 per cent plus of cellphone bills, 66 per cent of the world's funds transfers, 80 per cent of the world's stock exchanges between Open VMS and Tandem, and, perhaps most importantly, holds over 80 per cent of automated lottery systems.

Internetweek via NewsEdge Corporation said: "Our project is committed to using OpenVMS on the Alpha platform." (Oops).

Its clustering capability is second to none, from MicroVAX to Wildfires (and yes, the presentation we saw used that word). It has shared memory clusters with Galaxy, Oracle support, fast failover mechanism and "shared everything".

It has cross fertilisation with Tru64 Unix, and as the documents related: "Now who else has this?"

In 2003, the new AlphaServers will have V7.x system support, with VMS on IPF (that's La Intella platforms) added later.

And here's the proof that Compaq/Intel will have to support OpenVMS more or less forever, and by hook or by crook, port it to the Itanic families.

DII COE for OpenVMS, that is the Defense Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment, will soon be required for all future US Defense Department projects. The document speculated that DII COE could extend beyond the borders of the United States, and will extend well beyond the government sector.

Indeed, DII COE needs an "explicit 15 year plus commitment to Open VMS". Compaq believes that the DII COE port will "enhance application portability" to Open VMS.

What sort of things will we seen in Open VMS V7.n? We'll see QIO server, which is improved disk serving, the shadowing of dissimilar devices, shadow copy priorities, failover from direct to served path, DLM in shared memory, SCS traffic over Fiber Channel, and ENSA support.

The fibre channel improvements will allow larger configurations and support over 100 kilometers, as well as IO hot swap, and support of 26 storage adaptors.

Future versions of OpenVMS will include CPU "hot add" and memory "hot add" (ouch), IO module hot swap, and memory "hot swap" is in sight (ouch again).

Remember our array of Mike Capellas? Well, Open VMS on future Alpha Servers looks an awful lot like this in EV7 (with an extra row of course), with dynamic partitioning looking very much like the Galaxy way, and it will come with clustering and Torus topology.

The documents describe Fast Path as being vital for IO performance on big multiprocessor systems, with full interrupt distribution.

Here is how Compaq thinks Open VMS can run on "industry standard architecture" (that's Itanic to you and me, readers).

The line goes like this. The VAX to Alpha move was not too bad, and was 32-bits to 64 bits. Alpha to IPF (Itanic IA-64 architecture) is 64 bits to 64 bits. VMS source code is cleaned up, and there are no "archaic" VAX leftovers. The project leader is "in place' and the "team is being built right now".

There are few "evident obstacles". It's not like the VAX to Alpha port, with 64 bit addressing, no interlocked instructions, and a different page size, 512B versus 8KB.

"A lot VAX/VMS applications relied heavily on the VAX architecture and were partly written in MAcro 32. This is not the case for Alpha/VMS. Almost no applications use Macro64."

Further, the IA-64 software offers goodies such as four privilege levels, CPL changes at entry points controlled by the operating system, "atomic semaphore" instructions, a good virtual memory system, uncacheable pages, 4K to 256MB page sizes, a "powerful instruction set", integer and FP registers, IEEE formats, selective little/big endians, software interrupts and a "sort of" PAL code. µ