11 ms·
OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]
- lallysingh 9y agoWho, and why?
- yuhong 9y agoI think at this point they are mostly targeting servers and not bothering with things like web browsers.
- nxc18 9y agoWindows NT was a spiritual successor to VMS, sharing a father in DEC's Dave Cutler. VMS fell out of use and is widely considered history. Still, it had some interesting ideas and I've always preferred my history to be living.
- derefr 9y agoMy question is, which of those "interesting ideas" didn't end up in Windows NT? Is there anything other OSes (Linux, ⋆BSD, macOS) could learn from VMS, that they can't better learn from WNT?
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoThe "everything is a file" paradigm and a non-physical filesystem come to mind.
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- protomyth 9y agoClustering - OpenVMS does clustering amazingly well. that is one thing that NT, Linux, and the BSDs could learn. Although, DragonFly BSD is working on the file system clustering with HAMMER 2.
- wogna 9y agoCould you elaborate on how it did things better than the common cluster file systems of today? (OCFS2, Hadoop, Ceph, etc.)
- valarauca1 9y agoOkay so OpenVMS wasn't just FileSystem clustering. It was physical PC clustering. So I group of networked computers appeared like 1 physical computer. While a MESO or DCOS can do this today, they don't offer durability. On OpenVMS clusters if the machine running a job physically explodes you don't lose data. RAM and process state is network synchronized. This allows for rolling upgrades. Your cluster can update and reboot 1 box at a time, but your apps never actually stop, TCP connections are never dropped ETC. For large corporations who've gotten used to these features they're awesome to hold onto.
- reitanqild 9y agoTCP connections are never dropped ETC One thing I wonder now: how can this work? Is there a physical load balancer in front or something?
- eej71 9y agoThat claim is simply not true.
- MrBuddyCasino 9y ago"RAM and process state is network synchronized." Is this as slow as it sounds?
- lb1lf 9y agoPlease bear with the lack of details, as my (very limited) VMS experience involved an offline system which never broke, but: it is amazingly tolerant of hardware failures, I recall sitting slack-jawed over the AlphaStation manual after learning you could hot-swap just about anything - including CPU boards! Granted, that is as much (if not more!) a feature of the hardware architecture than the OS - but amazing still. I've never heard of an NT box capable of that - maybe the Alpha port could do it? Anyone know?
- iheartmemcache 9y agoFun fact: Windows 2008 R2 and Itanium 2 had lock-step fault-tolerance. (Which is on par with the other "biggies"-- VMS, IBMs OS360/MVS, and HP (nee Compaq Tandem)). On a more relevant note, I know x86-64 Xeon's can mark bad RAM, disk drives, and network cards, and hot-swap them all out out (and has been able to do so for > 10 years) on most motherboards (it's supported at the OS level for Windows server), not sure if it ever had full CPU failure support though.
- PeCaN 9y agoA few companies like IKEA and Indian Railways, as well as a bunch of healthcare companies. As for why, because it works really well. It's not new and shiny but it doesn't break, it's fast, and it has a lot of nice features that still aren't common (clustering and RMS being the two big ones).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yourapostasy 9y agoThere are still a non-trivial pile of organizations out there that rely upon VMS. I still can hardly believe it myself when I run into them, but as I understand the situations when I ask out of curiosity, these are relatively lower-margin organizations, and the cost of rewriting their VMS applications for them greatly exceeds the cost of adopting a platform that is a port to a major chip architecture and emulating the older chip architecture on that new chip when needed. Generally, a rewrite places the organization's ongoing processes at huge, disruptive risk, because the existing application and its configuration accumulated all the corner cases earned painfully in the past (often stretching into decades of accreted domain knowledge). Forget the cost of the technical effort to rewrite: even if that were zero, the business impact to take on all the costs of relearning even just a quarter of those lessons in even just a five year project is excessive.
- wogna 9y agoCould you give an example of such an industry? VMS to me has always been that OS that everyone claimed to be better than UNIX-likes, but none could explain why.
- fleitz 9y agoImagine server that has been up for decades. It can remain live through OS upgrades, hardware upgrades and I believe even architecture changes. It's like places that use mainframes it's probably not a good idea to build a new bank on mainframes but if you have one it's far less risk to keep the mainframe than rewrite everything. OpenVMS has some very unique features but truthfully it's most valuable feature is it runs the software they have.
- wogna 9y agoBut that's the thing: places which fit those requirements usually run some IBM solution (AS/400 and the likes). I've never encountered VMS in production before, so I'm really curious to some concrete examples of companies using it.
- srean 9y agoI hear that VMS is one of those OS's that got its concurrency API done right (BeOS would be another). Windows NT inherited a lot of that. To give an example, POSIX compliant asynchronous I/O on Linux is not that great (it used threads internally). There is also non POSIX async I/O on linux. But these are fare less mature and time tested and over all not a very uniform API.
- wogna 9y agoThat's not really a fair comparison: Windows I/O completion ports are a proprietary standard that is part of the NT kernel, while POSIX AIO is just a user-space libc extension that was added later on (as far as I know, none of the kernel-space posix AIO proposals got merged in). It's easier to get things right when you defined your own standards, at the cost of portability. But even then, you might argue that that completion ports are less than ideal: you incur a lot of complexity in the file system drivers, while e.g. solaris/BSD offer similar functionality without that burden. I'm not familiar with BeOS at all, but browsing through Haiku's API documentation I can't really find much. What exactly were you referring to?
- Victoria454 9y agoI just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do,====http://bit.do/dnRs5 http://bit.do/dnRs5
- andrewbinstock 9y agoIf you're talking about Linux specifically, that's not quite accurate history. Prior to POSIX threads, Linux had it's own threading model--Linux Threads--which frankly was terrible. They added the full POSIX later on in part b/c the Linux threading was so awful. [1] has more detail. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads
- wogna 9y ago
- bitwize 9y agoOpenVMS is more reliable than Unix, and bears a more sophisticated kernel design intended to handle real-world workloads. In particular, unlike every extant Unix except Solaris, async I/O is handled the correct way in OpenVMS (and Windows NT), with real async system calls and completion-based notification.
- 4ad 9y ago> OpenVMS is more reliable than Unix, and bears a more sophisticated kernel design intended to handle real-world workloads. So Linux is not intended to run real worldloads?
- akg_67 9y agoSeveral companies in Petrochemicals, refinery, utilities, Oil & Gas, Pharma still have OpenVMS in operation. The last one I encountered was in 2012, I was told it had been running for 10+ years nonstop. I mostly worked with OpenVMS on VAX in mid-90s. They were the workhorse of manufacturing/process control systems.
- chx 9y agoAtomic plants. Why? I guess because it doesn't stop. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_pdp11_until_2050/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep... http://www.mapps.l-3com.com/candu-plant-control-systems.html http://www.mapps.l-3com.com/candu-plant-control-systems.html
- rollthehard6 9y agoSee also Tandem, another HP owned system now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop_(server_computers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop_(server_computers)
- krylon 9y agoWhich makes me wonder - does anyone know if HP has plans to port NonStop to some non-Itanium platform? I have never worked with this system, but I have heard great things about its scalability and availability.
- rollthehard6 9y agoOne nice feature of VMS that I haven't seen mentioned here yet is the built in versioning of files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11
- bediger4000 9y agoThis was widely reputed to be a method for DEC to sell more (expensive) disks. The only thing I ever found a use for the built-in versions was to purge them.
- andreiw 9y agoMore like why not. It's still a very modern OS, in many ways unique, and with a large install base that pays well.
- protomyth 9y agoOpenVMS supports nine programming languages,six of which use a DEC-developed, proprietary back-end code generator on both Alpha and Itanium. We are creating a converter to internally connect these compiler front-ends to the open source LLVM back-end code generator, which targets x86_64 as well as many other architectures. (The other three compilers have their own individual pathways to the new architecture.) This should be interesting when they get done. OpenVMS had a reputation of not going down and having amazing storage clustering. I found it a bit odd when I used it in college and years later on a job. I wish it had been open sourced, but I guess it makes me feel good to know it’s still going regardless.
- mariuolo 9y ago> (The other three compilers have their own individual pathways to the new architecture.) Is one of them for VAX or is binary support for that architecture being dropped?
- ch_123 9y agoBased on some of the prior documents, I believe they are: MACRO-32 (The compiler for VAX assembly), C++, Ada MACRO-32 works at a lower level than the other languages, and needs to generate assembly directly instead of an IR. The C++ compiler is being replaced by Clang, and the previous VMS releases used Adacore's compilers, so Adacore will need to be convinced to port their compiler to x86 VMS.
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- pjbster 9y agoFor those interested in DEC history, HP have put the text of their Digital Technical Journal articles online at http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/past.htm http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/past.htm (no figures, alas). Volume 4 issue 4 introduced the Alpha architecture and includes an article describing the effort to port OpenVMS: http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art7.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art7.pd...
- iamcamiel 9y agoAbout a year ago, all of these were scanned from the paper originals. Available as PDF - WITH figures - from http://www.dtjcd.vmsresource.org.uk http://www.dtjcd.vmsresource.org.uk
- iamcamiel 9y agoThere's also the later (since 2003 or so) OpenVMS technical journal: http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/journal/ http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/journal/
- andreiw 9y agoThese dudes are insane in a good way. Also, their earlier slide decks had more diagrams and even screenshots.
- iamcamiel 9y agoThanks! I have some videos online of presentations I did at last year's OpenVMS Boot Camp. Some with diagrams :-) My apologies for the sometimes poor audio quality. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwebt4CzDP_hT2rHCm8SwL0k1FZ9aAAsA https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwebt4CzDP_hT2rHCm8Sw...
- octotoad 9y agoReally hoping the Hobbyist License program continues on to the x86 port.
- krylon 9y agoIn the x86_64 server space (which is, what, 90% of the server market today?), the choice of operating systems is basically between Windows and some variant of Unix (Solaris and its open source offspring, numerous GNU/Linux distros, and *BSD). Adding another system to the mix, especially one that has been in development for ~40 years, is an interesting proposition in itself. Add to that the reputation OpenVMS has for reliability and security, and I could certainly see a bright future for it on commodity hardware. Whether that actually comes to pass is another question, but there is at least potential.
- cartoonfoxes 9y agoIf the licensing fees on x86_64 aren't ridiculous, I will be tempted to make a serious evaluation of it at work.
- abraham_s 9y agoI worked on OpenVMS at the start of my career. I heard that the customer didn't want to port away from OpenVMS and this prevented HP from killing it off. One famous story in VMS folklore was where a building containing a datacenter catches fires and Unix admins run into the building to retrieve the backup disks and OpenVms admin do not since clustering give hot backup by default. Another story was of banks having data centers near the twin towers. The datacenters go down since the air conditioners go down due to the dust from the twin towers crashing. But the OpenVms cluster continue to operate since the half of the cluster is in New Jersey. It was ported to Itanium while the x84 port and the POSIX compatibility project was never completed.
- iamcamiel 9y agoThe Commerzbank case (datacenter near twin towers, contingency site in Rye, NY) is well documented: http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0407/commerzbank.pdf http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0407/comme...
- iamcamiel 9y agoI see lots of questions about who uses OpenVMS. In general, places where downtime and security breaches are frowned upon, as well as markets where VMS has had a long-time presence, and where moving away doesn't solve any problems they have and just costs money (in some industries, particularly the cost of re-certifying systems). Without giving away any specific customers, I have personally dealt with VMS customers in the following markets: nuclear industry (power plants, research reactors, reprocessing plants, research labs), military (weapons systems, logistics), law enforcement, railroads, airports, healthcare, manufacturing (process control, logistics), retail, and I may have overlooked some markets.
- ljosa 9y agoI found this picture of the team. Not sure how old the picture is. https://yellow.place/file/image/cover/0/0/204/ulriejwjzgbqtian.jpg https://yellow.place/file/image/cover/0/0/204/ulriejwjzgbqti...
- iamcamiel 9y agoThat's a fairly old one, IIRC it dates from the 8.4-1H1 release, or May 2015. The team is considerably larger today.
- ams6110 9y agoIs there a VAX emulator/VM for x86 that would allow running VMS?
- lakkal 9y agoSIMH emulates a lot of things, including VAX. You used to be able to get a Hobbyist license for OpenVMS from HP. I'm not sure whether you still can. http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
- iamcamiel 9y agoYes, you can still get hobbyist licenses from HP for OpenVMS: https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548 https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548 Note that some fields that are not marked mandatory should be treated as mandatory, esp. the one about the intended use. Besides VAX emulators, there are also Alpha emulators you can run OpenVMS on; of interest to hobbyists are FreeAXP - free as in free beer, not open source, and Windows only - (www.freeaxp.com), and for those who want to be able to change it, the open source ES40 Emulator (www.es40.org) (disclaimer - I am the author of both of these emulators)
- iamcamiel 9y agoFor those unfamiliar with OpenVMS clusters, here's an excellent write-up: http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0306/openvms.pdf http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0306/openv...
- technofiend 9y agoThis may be a fun anecdote or a cool story bro but I attended the 1982 National Computer Conference (aka NCC) in Houston, TX. At the time I was attending a high school with a PDP-11/05 and a PDP-11/34A which along with a PLATO terminal which were the center of any student's life interested in computers. Needless to say I was beyond excited to see Digital's booth with actual Vaxen. They were mystical, super powerful systems we could only dream of one day touching at college. One of the floor walkers was demonstrating VMS and let me login and play around. At school we had learned all sorts of commands by a mix of monkey command line silliness (we discovered SUBMIT when someone literally typed SUBMIT TO MY WILL at the prompt) and reading the hallowed documentation which were normally locked away in the IT director's office. You had to be especially good (straight A student) or a toady to get access to the docs. Anyway we learned RSTS/E would let you claim resources with the allocate command. You could ALLOC a printer or disk but at NCC Digital had networked their systems to demonstrate global VAX clusters and VMS supported the same command across the network! You could ALLOC HOST::DEVICE and it would work. Out of curiosity I ALLOC'd an entire VMS node (ALLOC RED::). It crashed. Unable to believe it when they got the server up I tried it again and it crashed again. I slunk away nervously sweating the rest of the day, convinced somehow that the Digital police were going to descend on me and kick me out of the conference. I went back the next day and confessed and told them what I had done to crash the VAX, figuring they would no longer be angry and that they should know what happened. Unrelated to crashing the VAX I ended up getting a job offer from a Digital client to write Pascal code for MRI machines connected to VAXen strictly from one of those right place right time conversations. Those were the days. (Sadly as a 10th grader with no car I had to turn down the job.)
- seasoned_geek 9y agoFor those who have never heard of OpenVMS they might want to get themselves a copy of this book: http://theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/app_book.html http://theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/app_book.html VMS was the OS of choice when it posolutely absitively had to work. It was even banned from the Black Hat conferences because it never gave up the flag. THEN they started adding OpenSource components and it became just as insecure and unstable as Windows and Linux. It is now, once again welcomed at Black Hat conferences because every piece of OpenSource on it is the same 8-lane wide security breach the other platforms have.