We assume Bochs is already installed. You can download an bootable Bochs disk image from here. Then uncompress it with “tar -jxvf disk1.tar.bz2” and modify Bochs’ configuration (make the cd bootable) ~/.bochsrc: boot: disk ata0-master: type=disk, mode=flat, translation=auto, path=”/freevms/freevms.dsk”, cylinders=130, heads=16, spt=63, biosdetect=auto, model=”Generic 1234″. It should show you this boot prompt. More FreeVMS info here.
so were is the meat of this article? seems pretty lame to me. where is the FreeVMS website at? what is FreeVMS, digitals software or a remake from scratch?
If we are to get just short how-to’s instead of articles. Then the editor should do some research before posting it so that he can add some meat too it..
This is sort of hilarious. Back in DEC’s glory days, there was plenty of flameage between VMS and Unix lovers. The two took very different approaches to a lot of basic things, and VMS developers sometimes left out important features (uh, pipes?) for the longest time because, it seemed, the developers just didn’t want to be like Unix.
But now everybody sees lots of free Unix-style systems, like Linux and the BSDs, and maybe Hurd some day. (Yeah, right.) VMS is thought of as a relic. Of course that’s not true: VMS is alive and well among lots of customers who use it for mission-critical applications. It’s very reliable, real industrial-strength stuff. Even more interesting is that Windows XP is itself a VMS descendant: Windows NT was written by David N Cutler, original author of VMS, after he jumped ship from DEC to MS. (Just before that, he wrote Mica, a portable VMS for DEC’s planned Omega processor. It was canned. He walked.) He modeled NT on VMS, changing some names around but keeping a lot of the core structures. That’s one reason why NT makes a decent server. By the time it became XP, it was so layered with graphical-layer and other spooge that it lots its essential VMSness, but that’s MS for you.
So what’s left? A free VMS clone would preserve the religion. No doubt it will be a cult, not a mainstream religion, but hey, any old VMShead just knows that VMS is better at heart than Unix. And they don’t care what everyone else thinks. Alas, FreeVMS looks a long way from being usable, so its early partial pre-Alpha kernel apparently needs to be virtualized under, cough, a Unix clone. 😉
I thought my HTML had gone awry again. jeez
what is FreeVMS, digitals software or a remake from scratch?
i trust that’s a rhetorical question, but … FreeVMS is an i386 implementation of VMS. i dunno which direction it’s recently taken, they were going to base some parts on Linux.
last time i checked (late 2003) there was only one main developer (the founder of the project). i was shocked that all the VMS fans weren’t contributing code. at the time, FreeVMS was wondering whether to focus on kernel or userspace. personally i’d base the kernel on Mach / BSD / linux / whatever and focus on a VMS-like environment in the userspace. just IMHO.
it’s a very cool project though. years ago there was PC VMS but that’s ancient code now. (an i386 vms would be very cool.)
Just look at the process list that FreeVMS shows after boot http://www.systella.fr/~bertrand/FreeVMS/freevms-1.jpeg it obviously runs slightly modified Linux kernel (and outdated at that).
So what’s the point of this exercise? To provide VMS APIs on top of Linux kernel and to run legacy applications?
If I were to run VMS on an x86 system, I would use the Simh emulator. With Simh loaded on either Windows or Linux, you can can install a fully functioning VAX/VMS system with networking, clustering, etc. I’ve done this on both Windows XP , VidaLinux (Gentoo based), and Fedora Core with great success.
If you are looking for a more productionalized and vendor supported solution, CHARON-VAX may be for you.
A good starting point for Simh VAX on linux can be found at
http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html .
The point is that the people behind this like VMS wouldn’t mind seeing an open source version of it. They’ve started with a linux kernel and started modifying it because it allows them to start off with something that works. If the project continues it’ll become more like VMS and less like linux.
Remember, just because you wouldn’t use something or write it yourself, doesn’t mean its stupid. It just means its not for you.
Thanks, I will try that beast.
Hi,
From the roadmap on the french page, you can read that they’ve started to modified linux kernel 2.4 heavily patched in order to use ext3. They will then upgrade this kernel by adding more control mecanism …etc… A patch will be donne to support the OSD-2 fs in ro mode and later ODS-5 in rw
I hope OS New will support FreeVMS, i.e. include it’s icon in thier news articles, and offer a section in thier “Topics Section”…
🙂