Installing OpenVMS 8.4 Alpha inside AXPbox with networking | Hacker News Reader

Installing OpenVMS 8.4 Alpha inside AXPbox with networking

raymii.org

50 pointsjandeboevrie8 comments

Excellent write up, so detailed! Thanks for posting it.

I wonder if AXPbox would compile on Pi? Will try it just to witness the history in progress, ES40 with numerous fans and whirrrs of the SCSI drives ... silently blinking on a Pi board.

That was originally my idea - that's why I need an open source Alpha emulator. I don't have my Pi set up right now, but considering es40 builds on RPi AXPbox should, too, at least on a 64-bit OS.

Great work! Hope you can get any help with it from DECUS/VMSports folks.

What's the choice of the 64-bit OS for RPi? I was about to try this with my vanilla RPi 3B+, just to realize it's 32-bit raspbian...

BTW, VSI is readying x86 port of the OpenVMS [1], not sure how far would it maintain Alpha/IA version.

[1]: https://vmssoftware.com/updates/state-of-the-port

I used Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi 4 for the es40 testing. It's however quite possible that AXPbox will run on 32-bit Raspbian - I had problems with a PowerPC G4 (Freescale MPC7447A) CPU, but that is in addition to being 32-bit also big endian.

Tried following this guide, and ended up with I/O failure during the installation. Replacing the emulated IDE controller with a SCSI one solved the problem. I got some non-fatal errors during installation, but the OS installed successfully and I've not run into any problems once the installation finished.

The SCSI controller is less stable (more buggy) than the IDE controller, but glad it works for you! The non fatal errors are okay as well, now time for you to setup a cluster!

Interesting, that never happened to me. I wonder if the problem is reproducible.

It happened repeatedly on my system, which runs Fedora 33 and has a 3950X CPU. Not sure what other variables may be at play here.

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