Company VMS Software, five years ago I bought the rights to continue developing the OpenVMS operating system from Hewlett-Packard (Virtual Memory System), published Release OpenVMS 9.1, Noteworthy Implementation of the support of architecture X86-64. OpenVMS operating system has been developing since 1977, it is used in fault tolerant systems that require increased reliability, and was previously available only for architectures VAX, ALPHA and Intel Itanium. noteworthy that attempts to porting OpenVMS to the X86 system at the end of 1980 were not successful due to the termination of financing, after which Port author went to Microsoft and created Windows NT.
The proposed OpenVMS port for the X86-64 architecture, in addition to installing the real equipment, supports the priority of KVM, VMware and VirtualBox virtual machines. The port is assembled based on the same OpenVMS source texts, which are used in versions for Alpha and Itanium architectures, using a conditional compilation that replaces the capabilities associated with the features of hardware architectures.
OpenVMS code adapted for assembly using LLVM instead of the GEM proprietary compiler used to build Alpha and Itanium ports ( A special translator is written, reflecting GEM IR in LLVM IR, and Clang is adapted to build C ++ code for OpenVMS). To determine and initialize the equipment UEFI and ACPI are involved, And the RAM drive is involved in the load instead of a special VMS bootable mechanism specific to different equipment. To emulate the missing levels of VAX, Alpha and Itanium privileges, missing in X86-64 systems, in the OpenVMS kernel is involved SWIS module Software Interrupte Services.