Emulating VMS?

Craig A. Berry · *nix forums Guru Wannabe Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 143

Thanks for the elaboration. There are some things you need to know about VMS before you get too much further with including it in your plans. First of all, while one of the VAX emulators is open source, the OS itself is not. There is a free license available for hobbyists, and it seems that most everyone considers unremunerated contributions to open source projects to be a valid use of the hobbyist license.

However, as I understand it, you cannot freely distribute OS media even though the recipient of the distribution will have to get his or her own licenses in order to run it. There is one and only one outfit that has blessings from HP to distribute low-cost OS media to hobbyists (http://www.montagar.com), so if you were planning to distribute an image of a running, emulated, VMS system as part of your master image, that sounds to me like it would probably be a copyright violation.

There would of course be some value in already having the emulator there ready to go so the target developer audience could just add software after obtaining their own OS media. One other thing you should know about running a VAX emulator, though, is that the VAX version of VMS has seen very little in the way of enhancements in recent years (which makes sense since the processor's last ship date was about six years ago). Meanwhile there have been extensive new developments on Alpha and Itanium, which are currently more or less on par with each other, though within the next year or two we'll probably start seeing more Itanium-only enhancements.

Among the goodies you don't get when you run VMS on VAX are: IEEE floating point, the ability to preserve filename case, long filename support, large file support, any 64-bit features, POSIX-compliant file dates, symlinks, hard links, and many, many C-runtime enhancements for more posixy behavior. Obviously if an alpha or itanium emulator surfaces, it would be far preferable to use that.

Your idea is splendid and I'm glad to see you including VMS on the list of OS's you want to provide. From a licensing standpoint, though, it's probably going to be more like Windows than like Linux.

On Tuesday, March 07, 2006, at 03:04PM, Adam Kennedy <adam@phase-n.com> wrote:

Adam Kennedy · *nix forums beginner Joined: 24 Feb 2006 Posts: 8

Wow, thanks for all the responses guys.

In explanation of why solutions like this aren't suitable, they only
deal with a single case of me personally having access.

The testing system I'm creating is intended to allow the testing of Perl
modules on every platform from a single whitebox PC available for under
$500.

So by having some open source operating system running in an image on an
open source or otherwise easy to license emulator, I can include system
images in the 10-20gigabyte standard collection of system images.

On installing the test system, you bittorrent the whatever gigabytes (or
order a DVD set or some such) and then can test across everything.

So thus ordinary linux/mac-resident developers can test their packages
against BSD or Linux or Darwin, other hardware architectures, VMS etc
etc, and see why things are failing/

(there's other solutions in the works for the commercially licensed
windows stuff, but I'd like to keep the number of things requiring
either dedicated hardware, authentication, or
non-free-and-redistributable licenses to an absolute minimum.

Hence the attempt at the purest emulation approach.

I'll be checking out the various emulators mentioned over the coming weeks.

Thanks

Adam K

Craig A. Berry wrote:

SYSMGR · *nix forums beginner Joined: 27 Nov 2005 Posts: 2

Craig A. Berry · *nix forums Guru Wannabe Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 143

At 5:31 PM +1100 3/7/06, Adam Kennedy wrote:

D Webb · *nix forums beginner Joined: 07 Mar 2006 Posts: 1

Vorländer, Martin · *nix forums beginner Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 4

Adam Kennedy <cpan@ali.as> wrote:

Adam Kennedy · *nix forums beginner Joined: 24 Feb 2006 Posts: 8

I know I asked a more-specific question before, but to rephrase it...

Is there ANY way to virtualise or emulate a VMS system on something
other than a VMS system?

Preferably if at all something I can run on an open source X86 operating
system.

Speed is not an issue. I don't care how slow it might be.

I want to add VMS to my new testing cluster, but I'd need SOME way of
emulating it.

Thanks

Adam K

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