V9.2-1 Operating Environment Announcement

[madsweeney]

VMS Software Inc announced the release of the V9.2-1 Operating Environment for x86-64 today. All customers with x86 evaluation licenses, all partners with x86 licenses, and all community users with x86 licenses can download the software from sp.vmssoftware.com, the package name is X860921OE. Learn more about the release at https://vmssoftware.com.

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Major Milestone Reached!

VMS Software, Inc. is excited to announce V9.2-1 of OpenVMS for x86 has passed its readiness review! Installation testing, regression testing, stress testing, and documentation updates are complete, and OpenVMS for x86 will now be fully supported in production environments. V9.2-1 includes many improvements to the VMS Operating System and integrated products with an emphasis on robustness and stability.

If you have previously been provided an Evaluation license (E9.2-1), you do not need to re-apply for access to V9.2-1 as it will be made available to you in the Service Portal (Commercial and Community users) no later than Monday, June 19th by 8:00 AM UTC±0:00.

If you do not currently have a copy of OpenVMS on x86 and would like one, please fill out the application found here. If your request is approved, you will be provided with download and installation instructions within two weeks after your application.

OpenVMS on x86 will be available for commercial orders on September 1, 2023.

We would like to extend a special thank you to all of our customers, partners, and community members who participated in the field test of E9.2-1 and provided valuable feedback to help us improve the operating environment.

[dmjb]

Congrats on the new release. The process of upgrading from E9.2-1 to V9.2-1 was quick and painless.

[pocketprobe]

It was even fast and painless on my bare metal box. My disk performance is definitely better.
Thanks for another great release!

[cgrant]

Thanks for the update. Just curious...what type of disk? Even though we are not supporting bare metal, it might be interesting to know what device driver is involved. We could check to see if the driver itself changed.

Clair

[pocketprobe]

You're most welcome. I wonder if it had something to do with the 2 megabyte memory pages improvement in V9.2-1?
The disk in question is a 10k rpm Seagate SAS Disk (ST300MM006) behind an old LSI 1068E. Installing the base operating environment was faster, and DFG/DFO also seems to have a bit more I/O occurring during runtime but that test list not scientific. The performance that was noticeably better was uploading a file to the machine via FTP to a secondary disk, now over 3MB/s up from 2.5 MB/s.

Also, for things being faster, building and running colorcat from here: https://github.com/Mr-Bossman/colorcat the printing over ssh does work smoother, and is faster over OPA0:

I did start a thread, cataloging my adventure with my unsupported configuration here: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=8621

Adding the device ID for either of the SATA controllers in AHCI mode on the machine does make it bug check early on in the boot process, which I did experiment to see and that behavior remains the same. I'll make another post about that, as the ancient disk controller is the only thing that isn't a perfect experience with the machine.

[cgrant]

Code: Select all

ANCHOR$ search sys$sysroot:[sysexe]sys$config.dat 1068e/win=(1,8)

device          = "LSI Logic 1068e SAS"
  name          = PK
  driver        = sys$pkmdriver.exe
  adapter       = PCIE
  id            = 0x00581000
  boot_class    = DK
  boot_flags    = HW_CTRL_LTR, UNIT_0
  flags         = SAS, PORT, BOOT
end_device
ANCHOR$

Last change in PKMDRIVER was in July of 2022 so your improvements must be the result of other factors.

Clair

[agn453]

I went searching for the release notes for V9.2-1 on https://docs.vmssoftware.com/ without success - then finally found them via the announcement at https://vmssoftware.com/about/v921/

Can someone please add them to the docs portal? Thanks

Tony
(A community license user).