Note (and as the subject of this thread says) that all year it has
been talks about a 8.4-2L1 Alpha version. More or less a recompile
of the current 8.4-2L1 for Itanium. I noticed now that what was
downloaded earlier today was ALpha 8.4-2L2. The cover letter (dated
June-2017) says:
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"VMS Software, Inc. (VSI) is pleased to introduce the VSI OpenVMS
Alpha Performance Release Version 8.4-2L2 operating system (hereafter
referred to as VSI OpenVMS Alpha Version 8.4-2L2) and associated
layered products. VSI OpenVMS Alpha V8.4-2L2 (a modified release of
VSI OpenVMS Alpha V8.4-2L1) has been optimized to take advantage of
architectural features such as byte and word memory reference instructions,
and floating-point improvements, which are available only in AlphaServer
EV6 or later processors. This optimized release improves performance by
taking advantage of faster hardware-based instructions that were previously
emulated in software. NOTE: VSI OpenVMS Alpha V8.4-2L2 will not work on,
and is not supported on, AlphaServer pre-EV6 systems."
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Our boxes uses EV67, so that is fine for us.
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The "8.4-2L2 New Feat and Rel Notes", in section "3.1.4 Considerations When
Building Software to Run on VSI OpenVMS Alpha Versions", also says:
"VSI has created two versions of the VSI OpenVMS Alpha operating system.
• VSI OpenVMS Alpha V8.4-2L1. This is a general purpose VSI OpenVMS Alpha
release that runs on all supported HPE AlphaServer platforms regardless
of chip architecture.
• VSI OpenVMS Alpha V8.4-2L2. This is a rebuild of the VSI OpenVMS Alpha
operating system with compilers that produce specially tuned instructions
to take advantage of later features in the Alpha architecture. These can
provide a performance benefit for some workloads. This release will only
run on, and is only supported on, EV6 and later HPE AlphaServer systems.
If you build software to run on VSI releases of OpenVMS for Alpha systems,
you should carefully choose which version of VSI OpenVMS Alpha to use when
building your product:
• If you intend to use the product on any VSI OpenVMS Alpha release and
all supported target platforms, VSI strongly recommends that you build the
software on VSI OpenVMS V8.4-2L1. This will ensure that any precompiled
system code that is included within the images will run on all systems,
regardless of chip architecture level.
• If you are building tuned code already and only support EV6 or later
processors, you may build on either version of the operating system with
no issues."
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Still fine for us, but can be useful information for someone else looking
at the Alpha offer from VSI...
Regards.
One question... Are those "compilers that produce specially tuned
instructions" the same as compiling with the /ARCH=EV6 switch? Or has
VSI made special versions of the compilers to build VMS itself? Not that
it matters much or that I need (or expect) an answer, but anyway... :-)
And a second question... How large parts of VMS has been recompiled
in this way and is that a reason to run more tests then otherwise?