[rescue] advice on rescuing an e10k

[Sheldon T. Hall]

 Quoth Magnus ...
> Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> > That depends on how much it costs to port the application.  
> > In many cases,
> > the costs to port an application can be considerable, 
> 
> What is there to port?  You're going from sparc to sparc.  Anything 
> you've got running on an E10K should run on a Niagra box, no?

I have no idea, actually.  I've been involved in very few straight-over
ports in my career.  I would suspect that it would depend on the original
language of the application, how it was written, and how much of the
application ended up being adapted to the machine it was running on. 

Some little Java app might be a simple matter of copying the files.

At the other end of the scale might be something mostly in C, but with
significant, and speed-critical, parts written in assembler.  All the
adaptation to the local machine and its peripherals are in the source code,
rather than in some kind of configuration file.  Worse, the whole thing was
written by Mel, The Real Programmer, 20 years ago, and Mel isn't speaking to
anyone at the company any more.  No one curretly on the staff can even
figure out how some of the code works, even the parts for which they can
find the source code.  The whole thing gives the VP of IT ulcers because
every application in the whole company uses some part of this application;
he just hopes he can make it to retirement before the hardware craps out.

-Shel