[Simh] Use muliprocessor with SIMH

[Bolhar-Nordenkampf Ferdinand]

Gilber Delafosse:

> It was easier to port from VAX to Charon , that vesting tho 
> whole thing .....

And vesting assumes always nonprivileged code and even
with code like this there are still some problems (try
to vest code created by the VAX PL/1 compiler and you'll
know what I'm talking about!...).

And if your code contains one or more sys$cmexec/
sys$cmkrnl invocations, you can forget vesting.

> Simh would have been another solution. But it was the 
> customer's choice
> (you know the "software" vs "freeware" issue ;-)

Another problem is just versioning. If you migrate
hardware, you'll fall in trouble if the new hardware
doesn't support the old software version. For example,
the OP mentioned AlphaServer DS20E as an alternative
to VAX. However, the DS20E doesn't run with VMS V6.
So, if you have running VMS V6.2 on your VAX systems
(as we did before migrating to simh), you'll have to
upgrade to VMS V7. And very often, on Alpha, this will
require new versions of layered products (like CDD,
Rdb, ACMS, FORMS, RALLY, NOTES, Message Router - just
to name some few!) and relinking all user-written code
using the shared libraries supplied with these products.
And many times, it will require some modifications on
the source code as well. This requires a development
environment and - a developer stuff! And that's where
the real problems start - what to do if there isn't
a developer stuff anymore since VMS development was
dropped some years ago?

> So we'll try to "Aest" that application to Itanium. 

Is there a tool like VEST to migrate to Itanium?
How is the migration path?

VAX -> Alpha -> Itanium       or
VAX          -> Itanium?

BTW: on VMS Itanium, is there a PATCH utility?

Greetings, Ferry
--

Ing. Ferry Bolhár-Nordenkampf
Magistrat der Stadt Wien - MA 14
A-1010 Wien
E-Mail: bol at adv.magwien.gv.at

"Wenn hier einer schuld ist, dann immer nur der Computer."