OpenVMS Programming Concepts Manual 1

This document, "HP OpenVMS Programming Concepts Manual, Volume I" (January 2005), is a two-volume manual for system and application programmers familiar with the HP OpenVMS environment.

This Volume I covers three main parts:

1. Process and Synchronization: It details process creation (subprocesses and detached processes), inter-process and intra-cluster communication mechanisms (like mailboxes, logical names, global sections), and process control for programming tasks. It also explains symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) concepts, including kernel threads, their structure, scheduling, and synchronization methods like event flags and lock management.
2. Interrupts and Condition Handling: This section describes Asynchronous System Traps (ASTs), including their routines, declaration, queuing, delivery, and handling. It also covers the OpenVMS Condition Handling facility, explaining exception conditions (hardware/software), arithmetic exceptions, unaligned access traps, signal argument vectors, and how to write and debug condition and exit handlers.
3. Addressing and Memory Management: This part focuses on 32-bit and 64-bit virtual address space, guidelines for 64-bit Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and memory management services and routines for Alpha, I64, and VAX systems. It covers virtual page sizes, memory allocation routines, working set paging, process swapping, and the creation and management of various types of sections (disk file, global, page frame, memory-resident). It also touches upon Very Large Memory (VLM) features.

The manual includes appendixes with C macros and examples for 64-bit programming.