Will Ingres be ported to OpenVMS on Itanium?

[tkupp]

I've seen the announcements for ports to HP-UX or Linux on Itanium and
OpenVMS on Alpha, but I've searched the site and haven't seen anything
about OpenVMS on Itanium. Are there plans to do such a port?

Archived post - originally posted at 2005-08-24 18:27:44

[joe]

Hi,

The OpenVMS Alpha source is largely (I'd say in the neighborhood of 98%)
portable to OpenVMS Itanium (and I'm happy to report that --with a little
bit of help-- someone outside of CA or HP has downloaded the 3.0.2.109
sources and built that on OpenVMS Alpha--see thread in the Developer's
Forum).

The Itanium port *is* in the planning and research stages. The main issue
is with converting the CS (Control System) part of the CL (compatibility
library), which is written in Alpha Macro-64 assembler, to Itanium. One
option is to use KP Services and the other is to adapt the CSMT (CS
MultiThreaded) code (used under Unix) to work with VMS POSIX Threads
facilities.

Do you have an existing Ingres application/database on Alpha VMS? And if I
may ask, does your interest in the Itanium VMS port have some timeframe
context that you'd like to convey (for input into our planning)?

Joe

Archived post - originally posted at 2005-08-11 10:06:49

[joe]

Hi Tom,

The Alpha version will be released for public beta before the Itanium
version. We're working on the former, but I don't have further info on a
beta date.

Joe

Archived post - originally posted at 2005-08-23 15:55:31

[tkupp]

> Do you have an existing Ingres application/database on Alpha VMS?

Actually, we have an existing Ingres app/db on VAX VMS.

> And if I may ask, does your interest in the Itanium VMS port have some
timeframe context that you'd like to convey (for input into our planning)?

There's nothing firm on the timeframe for a port. The current (hardware)
platform is unsupported and management would like to see this app moved
somewhere at some unspecified future time.

Archived post - originally posted at 2005-08-24 18:27:44

[tmonaco]

Hi Joe,

I noticed that the Alpha version of r3 still hasn't been released for
public beta. Is the Alpha version going to be released before this
recoding takes place, or is the plan to release the Alpha and Itanium
versions using a common code base?

Tom

Archived post - originally posted at 2005-08-19 12:08:01

[frankydude]

For our part, we have an ingres 6.4 on VAX/VMS 5.5-2
This database is running an important mission - for our organisation.

We would like to migrate to VMS 8.3 on itanium, as the Alphaserver line
of machines are now end of sale at HP. See:
HP Alpha Systems

For this purpose, we did purchase 2 RX2600 Itanium machines, that we intend to use for the migration.

I already downloaded and installed successfully INGRES 2006 R2 on Alpha, (we own 3 alphaservers 2100 but they are quite old and slow)
and I would like to do the same now with the itanium platform, as we would
prefer to migrate from VAX directly to itanium, especially since our itaniums are
quite fast machines.

Do you think that Ingres on OpenVMS Itanium could become available?

Thanks,

Francois

[stephenb]

The POSIX thread functionality for Ingres on VMS has now been coded and as a result Ingres now has an initial engineering build on Itanium. At this point we are running the port through very preliminary engineeriung testing and we have not even yet gotten it to a state where it can enter QA testing. I would expect that an initial "test" release will be available in a few months, but it's too early at this stage to give a more exact indication as to when.

[MagnusG]

Hi Stephen,

Has there been any progress on this port?

Regards,
Magnus
Tieto

[stephenb]

Hi Magnus,

Yes we are making progress, but it is slow because we have to fight the VMS debugger and it's not so good POSIX thread support, often resorting to debug statements in (like printf) the code to debug anything. We can now run all of the engineering tests by hand and have one or two issues to resolve. I would expect that we can hand a build to QA in the next few weeks. Once QA have done a first-pass run of the full QA suite we can asses the state of the port and give a better estimate of when we will have a beta release. Stay tuned.

[MagnusG]

Thanks Stephenb,
That sounds good but do understand it takes a while writing manual debug statements.

/Magnus