OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#11

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:23 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #10

nxc18 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 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.

My 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?

The "everything is a file" paradigm and a non-physical filesystem come to mind.

Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#12

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:25 AM UTC

PeCaN wrote: post #5

lallysingh wrote: post #2

Who, and why?

A 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]

Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#13

Post by protomyth » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:49 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #10

nxc18 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 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.

My 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?

Clustering - 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.

Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#14

Post by Amelia55 » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 5:50 AM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #11

derefr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 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?

The "everything is a file" paradigm and a non-physical filesystem come to mind.

Google is ►►►►►►http://cutt.us/7N2sG

Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#15

Post by wogna » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:08 AM UTC

srean wrote: post #8

lallysingh wrote: post #2

Who, and why?

I 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.

That'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?

Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#16

Post by wogna » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:10 AM UTC

yourapostasy wrote: post #6

lallysingh wrote: post #2

Who, and why?

There 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 th…

Could 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.

Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#17

Post by wogna » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:15 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #13

derefr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 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?

Clustering - 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.

Could you elaborate on how it did things better than the common cluster file systems of today? (OCFS2, Hadoop, Ceph, etc.)

Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#18

Post by Victoria454 » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:21 AM UTC

wogna wrote: post #15

srean wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

That'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 co…

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Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#19

Post by fleitz » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:29 AM UTC

wogna wrote: post #16

yourapostasy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There 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 th…

Could 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.

Imagine 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.

Re: OpenVMS State of the Port to x86_64 [pdf]

#20

Post by wogna » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:43 AM UTC

fleitz wrote: post #19

wogna wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could 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.

Imagine 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 run…

But 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.