10 ms·
Who, and why?
by lallysingh 9y ago
Who, 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?
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- 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.