[FreeVMS] FreeVMS

[Matthew Veety]

On Jun 13, 2013, at 1:43, BERTRAND Joël <joel.bertrand at systella.fr> wrote:

> Le 13.06.2013 0:09, Bill Pedersen a écrit :
>> Hello, new to the list but interested…
> 
> Hello,
> 
>> And definitely not new to VMS!
>> 
>> How does one get information on the current state of FreeVMS. I have
>> visited the freeVMS.net site but find that there is a lot of
>> incompleteness there, links that go to blank pages and such.
>> 
>> Given the current upheaval in the VMS community I would like to better
>> understand this environment so as to be able to help promote it and
>> encourage it.
> 
> FreeVMS project was created a long time ago. First kernels (until 0.3) were derivated from Linux kernel (2.4.15 if I remember) and were monolithic. These kernels were bootable but not easely maintenable.
> 
> 0.4 is rewritten from scratch on a L4 (like Hurd is written on a Mach kernel or MacOS X on NVU). L4 is choosen because it deos not contains unixism. It boots, it contains first memory management subroutines, but pager is missing.
> 
> Now, FreeVMS is slepping because there is no developers. To be alive, this project need :
> - a pager ;
> - some drivers (disk I/O), filesystems... Some code have been written (ODS2/5 for example) for O.3 kernel ;
> - a swapper ;
> - some libraries (a real POSIX libc et VMS libraries) ;
> - some contributers to write documentation and write pages on www.freevms.net.
> 
> Goal of FreeVMS is to propose a clone of OpenVMS with a good POSIX subsystem. Microkernel (L4) is written in C++ and servers written over L4 are written in procedural C++ too. First arch is amd64.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> JKB

Is development even going on still? The project seems really dead to me. 

Also why didn't we write a kernel ourselves?