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There is this great document (http://www.decus.de/events/alphamigration/vortraege/porting_openvms_to_integrity.pdf http://www.decus.de/events/alphamigration/vor

There is this great document (http://www.decus.de/events/alphamigration/vortraege/porting_openvms_to_integrity.pdf 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.

0xdky 5y ago
I lead a team to implement CIFS server in VMS on Itanium after deciding not to port ASV (Advanced Server - CIFS server for Alpha since it had a lot of hand tuned assembly for a specific architecture). We ported Samba and implemented a lot of C runtime functions to make porting less intrusive. As part of porting Samba to VMS, I made the early port of CVS client and streamline merging upstream changes with our VMS specific changes. Some of the most infamous 4 letter words we cussed all time was the missing 'fork' and 'fcntl' and all the work arounds we had to put in to get Samba working... I did meet quite a few very competent engineers from DEC times as part of my work and also interacted with David Butenhof of POSIX threads fame when debugging a thread library he and their team had developed and was used by ASV.