VMS Software, which bought the rights to continue developing the OpenVMS (Virtual Memory System) operating system from Hewlett-Packard, has provided enthusiasts with the opportunity to download the x9.2_86 port of the OpenVMS 64 operating system. In addition to the system image file (X86E921OE.ZIP), community edition license keys (x86community-20240401.zip) are offered for download, valid until April next year. The OpenVMS 9.2 release is marked as the first full release available for the x86-64 architecture.
The x86 port is built from the same OpenVMS sources used by the Alpha and Itanium versions, using conditional compilation to replace features tied to hardware architectures. UEFI and ACPI are used for hardware detection and initialization, and a RAM disk is used for booting instead of a hardware-specific VMS boot mechanism. To emulate the missing VAX, Alpha and Itanium privilege levels that are missing in x86-64 systems, the SWIS (Software Interrupt Services) module is used in the OpenVMS kernel.
The OpenVMS operating system has been in development since 1977, is used in fault-tolerant systems that require increased reliability, and was previously only available for the VAX, Alpha and Intel Itanium architectures. The system image can be used for testing in VirtualBox, KVM and VMware virtual machines. OpenVMS 9.2 includes VSI TCP/IP system services (such as support for SSL111, OpenSSH, and Kerberos), VSI DECnet Phase IV and VSI DECnet-Plus protocol suites, MACRO, Bliss, FORTRAN, COBOL, C++, C, and Pascal.
Source: opennet.ru