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The Rise Of QNX
QNX might not be new, but SirTimbly is right about it making a stir. Max von H. writes: "Audrey, the household net appliance from 3Com/ergo has been officially released, and there's even an official site on which you can smile at the design. The beast runs QNX/Neutrino, as stated in this ZDNet story. The sweet thing is it can sync with two PalmOS devices, which can make a geek couple's life much easier without having to fumble with a real PC. Say what you want, but Audrey could possibly be successful since anybody can use it, and 3Com has shown a simple system rules when it comes to do simple things."
And no mention of QNX is complete without a reference to the QNX demo disk, which packs a pretty amazing set of features onto a floppy. Here too, it's free, but not Free.
I wanna bend you over and shove a PoopyMoose up your ass little boy.
grab your ankles bitch
I still dream that something will replace X but it is looking hopeless now...
"It's also really efficiently written, and almost completely modular (as opposed to Linux' monolithic-plus-kitchen-sink approach)."
I don't suppose you've ever used Linux, since lsmod, rmmod, insmod, depmod, modprobe are all parts of the wonderful world of mapping things dynamically into kernele space. With it, I can have hot plug PCMCIA, USB, and other devices without having to have this monolitihic kernel you decry. There's even a Microkernel Linux which adds the features that the HURD and QNX have, that Linux doesn't.
QNX is targetted at embedded devices. That tight focus lets it get away with not having support for 64gb of ram, scaling to 8-way SMP, NUMA, swap space, implementation of device drivers for PC and non-PC hardware of all kinds, and other requirements of being a kernel that can be embedded in devices lacking a memory controller, to massive SMP systems, to computing clusters.
"QNX is much more suitable for PDAs and otehr small systems than is Linux."
Ever heard the phrase "jack of all trades, master of none?" Linux is the swiss-army knife kernel. It may not be as good for skinning as a proper hunting knife, but it also has a saw, a can opener, a magnifying glass, and many other useful tools that you might need some day. Think about it.
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Here is the contents of my 1.0 megabyte winsfx.exe file. I used it to run windows on a 386sx-16 with 4MB of ram with no harddrive. I used over two megs for a ramdisk. Still had plenty left. Youll note this includes Winsock,Telnet client,FTP client,POP mail client, IRC client, Program manager, Sound blaster support, Notepad, Tetris, MasterMind, Clock, Several fonts, and a highspeed com driver. This is a piece work of windows 3.0,3.1,3.11 :-)
HOSTS 99 06-17-98 10:15p HOSTS
PROTOCOL 441 10-07-94 5:25p PROTOCOL
SERVICES 2,665 06-13-95 1:14p SERVICES
WIN BAT 65 06-26-98 6:45p WIN.BAT
BYE CMD 930 05-09-98 8:22p BYE.CMD
LOGIN CMD 3,531 06-26-98 6:55p LOGIN.CMD
COMMAND COM 54,619 05-20-98 7:23p COMMAND.COM
REG DAT 352 06-26-98 6:12p REG.DAT
WINSOCK DLL 159,744 07-24-95 5:09p WINSOCK.DLL
SHELL DLL 40,944 11-01-93 3:11a SHELL.DLL
TOOLHELP DLL 14,128 11-01-93 3:11a TOOLHELP.DLL
CTL3DV2 DLL 27,200 08-09-96 2:30a CTL3DV2.DLL
COMMDLG DLL 97,936 11-01-93 3:11a COMMDLG.DLL
SYSTEM DRV 2,304 11-01-93 3:11a SYSTEM.DRV
TIMER DRV 4,192 05-22-98 11:55p TIMER.DRV
VGA DRV 73,200 11-01-93 3:11a VGA.DRV
LMOUSE DRV 12,928 11-01-93 3:11a LMOUSE.DRV
SB20SND DRV 16,176 02-16-93 12:38p SB20SND.DRV
SBFM DRV 12,752 05-19-92 2:10p SBFM.DRV
SOUND DRV 3,440 11-01-93 3:11a SOUND.DRV
TWCOMM DRV 11,760 09-16-94 12:16p TWCOMM.DRV
KEYBOARD DRV 7,568 11-01-93 3:11a KEYBOARD.DRV
NOTEPAD EXE 31,936 05-01-90 3:00a NOTEPAD.EXE
TELNET EXE 57,216 03-31-98 6:54p TELNET.EXE
TCPMAN EXE 144,384 07-24-95 5:09p TCPMAN.EXE
TASKMAN EXE 3,744 05-22-98 9:46p TASKMAN.EXE
WINIRC EXE 96,768 03-16-95 9:01p WINIRC.EXE
FTP EXE 53,248 06-30-95 2:24a FTP.EXE
CLOCK EXE 16,416 05-22-98 9:45p CLOCK.EXE
TETRIS EXE 40,000 06-22-98 12:58a TETRIS.EXE
PROGMAN EXE 115,312 11-01-93 3:11a PROGMAN.EXE
DOSX EXE 32,682 11-01-93 3:11a DOSX.EXE
GDI EXE 220,800 11-01-93 3:11a GDI.EXE
KRNL386 EXE 76,400 11-01-93 3:11a KRNL386.EXE
USER EXE 264,096 01-07-98 8:51p USER.EXE
MRMIND EXE 20,464 06-22-98 1:08a MRMIND.EXE
LABPOP EXE 298,128 02-09-96 9:45a LABPOP.EXE
SERIFE FON 57,936 11-01-93 3:11a SERIFE.FON
SSERIFE FON 64,544 11-01-93 3:11a SSERIFE.FON
VGAFIX FON 5,360 11-01-93 3:11a VGAFIX.FON
VGAOEM FON 5,168 11-01-93 3:11a VGAOEM.FON
VGASYS FON 7,280 11-01-93 3:11a VGASYS.FON
COUR FOT 1,318 04-04-98 2:04a COUR.FOT
MAIN GRP 6,973 06-26-98 7:12p MAIN.GRP
SYSTEM INI 1,143 06-26-98 6:25p SYSTEM.INI
WINIRC INI 157 06-26-98 7:01p WINIRC.INI
CLOCK INI 90 06-26-98 6:38p CLOCK.INI
WIN INI 3,861 06-26-98 6:37p WIN.INI
TRUMPWSK INI 1,066 06-26-98 7:02p TRUMPWSK.INI
PROGMAN INI 122 06-26-98 7:12p PROGMAN.INI
qnx is a poor substitute for an OS let me tell you why: 1. drivers? what drivers. Hardware support is poor at best 2. QNX will not let you know how to interact with thier software. 3. it is not Unix it may feel like it at first but is very waterd down.
I did my first programming with QNX on ICON computers. Does anybody else remember using Alice Pascal or WATFILE, or Word Perfect under the enmulated DOS shell? Last the big thing was they QNX was to run the Amiga, when the QNX was at the University of Waterloo they gave hints to that, of course nothing happened.
Incidentally, has anyone ever mangaged to get a bootable QNX + firewall capability onto a 16MB Sandisk?
Anyone who has probably knows why I'm interested.
Why, so you can use your digital camera as a firewall? I guess since Doom has been ported to Digita, this would be a logical next step. Plug a USB hub and two USB NICs into the camera's USB port, and away you go!
It would be an excellent development environment... making snapshots would be a piece of cake!
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Although most of the people here are familiar with the use of Linux in various forms in real-time and embedded applications, there are a number of other free real-time alternatives. eCos has been mentioned but RTEMS is the oldest free RTOS. It has been ported to about a dozen CPU families, has TCP/IP, pSOS+ compatability, POSIX threads, ITRON, etc, etc. The source is there, GPL'ed, and there are prebuilt toolsets. See http://www.oarcorp.com/RTEMS. It is also important to remember that real-time and embedded systems come in many shapes and sizes. Most embedded systems are quite small and very cost-conscious. Embedded a hard drive or even a flash disk is out of the question. Consider your cell phone, pager, fuel injection system, etc. Those are really quite specific and limited hardware targets where price is king.
But they got Quake III! It's not fair! (*whine*) :)
Ah well, I guess you have to have something to do when you get bored in a reactor or dam.
-lx
If you had taken the time to read, you would have noticed that I was responding to a guy promoting XINU, whose homepage has *not* been updated in 2 years.
Ranessin
It never really fails to amaze me how many people totally miss sites like Lineo They make Embedix and several other cool versions of Linux such as realtime Linux.
:)
I am a huge BSD fan myself but people almost always never even give Lineo a second glance. They did a whole lot of very cool things to get Linux embedded.
They use A reduced libc (greatly;), Ash for the shell
The kernel is tightened up and is much smaller.
It comes with two graphics drawing utilities that are all text based for doing any kind of graphics stuff.
For embedded apps I do not believe Lineo is as good as QNX this is absed on my limited experience with the capabilities of the two OS'
Anyhow
Jeremy
I well and truly remember the ICONS... horrible beasts they were, but they got me hooked on the concept of true multi-user systems. When I was in grade 11 or so, they started changing them all out for PCs (IBM PS/2 model 25 and 30) and we lost the multiuser any terminal any time stuff. It wasn't until going to university and rediscovering multiuser through Ultrix that I was again in a "happy place". The ICONs were fabulously ahead of their time, however, as other posters have noted, the training for the teachers wasn't there... I remember helping the (nominally) gym teacher get through the manual, trying to explain to him why the administrative user should be called "root" and why he can't change it to "tree" - that's about age 14 or so. And then I found Linux (0.99pre14 or so - ahhh slackware) and the rest is history - strangely - macOS on desktop and Linux on all but two of the servers.
M
There just isn't that much left to dazzle us with.
How about something on the order of a 10uS* hard realtime latency? Or a microkernel architecture which blows away kernel modules?
Don't get me wrong; I'm a big Linux fan, but RTLinux (and the various other realtime variants) don't hold a candle to what QNX can do in that arena. QNX is x86 only though, and the various uClinuxes are for tons of different processors, much cheaper processors.
* - I believe this is the number. I don't think I'm far off with this number if it is wrong.
Firstly, QNX is pronounced Queue-nicks, not Queue-nucks.
Secondly, it was developed at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and then spun off into a company.
Thirdly, it is not *just* an embedded OS, its most prominant use (atleast to Ontario and Quebec elemenrtary and secondary school students some 10 years ago) was on the PC powering that evil Unisys companies line of diskless 80186 based network computers called the Icon of which our schools had ungodly amounts of. QNX is also used quite extensively in the Canadian Armed Forces and can be used as a desktop OS.
-- iCEBaLM
My friend works at a company who is leaving QNX because of its shortcomings. The company they're moving to says many people are leaving in favor of them or in favor of linux. Why? QNX gets poor performance overall and is a pain in the ass to program. It's posix compliant, but when porting things, or working with the OS, it's a royal pain in the ass. (I attempted to help him port BitchX and some random other tools once)
For reference though, they have two different OSes, QNX (the one the demo disk and the i-opener are based on), and Nuetrino.
Linux and the BSDs are much more capable, as are several other IA OSes including WindRiver and BeIA. (BeIA has actually been chosen for several next generation web appliances already and was demonstrated in Whirpools refigerators with the webpad).
If you mean Drag and Drop, it does have it. At least, it's documented in the Photon programmer's manual; so if it isn't there right now, it's coming soon.
Tim, at first I didn't get it, but now I see how clever you really are!
"Mmm... DoughNIX!"
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
These are the words you can read in one of the include in QNX RTP: #/usr/include/sys/asound.h ...
--------------------------------------------------
* THIS FILE IS COMPLETELY UNENCUMBERED BY THE GPL VIRUS, AS IT WAS DEVELOPED
* IN A "CLEAN-ROOM" FASHION WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE CONTENTS OF THE GPL-VERSION
* OF THE "asound.h" FILE, APART FROM ACCESS TO WWW.ALSA-PROJECT.ORG WHICH DOES
* NOT CONTAIN A GPL. -- Robert Krten, PARSE Software Devices, May 5, 2000.
--------------------------------------------------
They should learn about gpl'd soft instead of
copying them (and by the way creating bugs)
(it looks like how MS could have done...)
Obligiatory Berlin link.
http://www.talknerdy.org
I have not done any benchmarking on this, but I would presume running a distributed.net client under QNX would be an excellent way to get maximum use of your processors time.
That it supports modules doesn't mean it's modular. And, when was the last time you ran a driver in user space, had it crash, and restarted it without taking your system down for reboot?
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I am writing this from the QNX demo right now. it took about 15 minutes to get it going from scratch, including downloading it.
From the Package Mgr, I am currently downloading perl, pine, the quake3 engine and dozens of other *nixy GNU stuff that abounds.
My screen resolution is at 1280x1024 32bit, and the text and gui elements are amazingly crisp and tight. I didn't have to do any configuring other than choosing a resolution and color depth.
I was able to browse directly to a fat32 partition and play an mp3 within 30 seconds of gui bootup. It didn't detect my usb mouse though it is running a usb enumerator. I do have crappy usb on this mobo thouhg, so mileage may vary. this is the sweetest thing I'VE EVER SEEN.
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
I love to play with QNX and such...But it's wonderful windowing interface is always a sad reminder of how slow/bad X really is in *nix. And *nix serves as a reminder of how bad hardware support is in QNX (or BeOs for that matter). I am left with the same issue I have with the political candidates...I like 50% of what each one says, and deplore the other 50%.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
It started on DEC 11s, then X86, and recently PowerPC I believe.
reason it IS making inroads is because it is free
No it isn't, at least not for commercial applications. It's a free eval and to dink around with, which is good enough for me.
Even in the commercial aspect it is a lot freer than most alternatives because it is royalty free, which is a big bonus.
Actually, you don't have to manually swap, but you do need to manually turn on swap for each application.
I used QNX about twelve years ago. It used to power an educational computer called the Icon. It was actually a decent Unix-like system.
Anyway, it's definately not developed by 3COM. I think the real developer was Quantum Systems in Waterloo Ontario Canada.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
would you care to expound on that?
Daniel J. Kelly
If they've added new drivers, I think that's worthy of updating the homepage
Ranessin
QNX was NOT developped by 3com, and I quote: &The Ontario, Canada-based company was founded 20 years ago as a real-time operating system vendor."
At least get you facts straight and make it look like you actually read and understood the article before you post.
For smp in QNX RtP check out http://staff.qnx.com/~cdm/smp/. QNX Neutrino is the OS used for the QNX RtP (the "desktop" qnx). And QNX 4 is the os used for embedded applications (can probably be used as a desktop os aswell).
Check out http://www.qnxstart.com for lots more qnx stuff and downloads.
The recent launch of QNX RtP is certainly a change in that attitude.
Anyone who has probably knows why I'm interested.
Yet another thing is that the older embedded OSes were multi-thread, not multi-process. Again plus and minus, thread context switch is usually noticebly fast than process context switch. I've seen a number of programmers that learned in the DEC OS or Unix environment get tripped up in just-multi-thread embedded jobs, forgetting that all tasks share global variables and system resources.
And a fully linked OS+application tends to come up much faster than a "bootable" OS. Most people would be annoyed if their TV, microwave, or cell phone took as long to boot as their desktop *NIX - MSWindows isn't even in the same state much less the ballpark.
does it have native support for the cue cat?
This space intentionally blank
I also gave it a try. I downloaded the ISO image, burned it, booted it, installed it, and I must say - the install was flawless. The photon microgui is not X-based and is very fast. The OS itself is also very fast. I may use the floppy demo to setup an internet terminal on my LAN. I have to agree with you regarding the confusing file system layout.
You mentioned BeOS only now getting support from vendors and this is in fact mentioned on benews.com or one of the other beos sites. I am impressed with qnx overall as it has been a good embedded OS for many years now. It probably has more viability controlling robots in a high tech assembly plant than as a full blown desktop OS though. We'll just have to wait and see what comes of it.
HA HA ...HA
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
int[] bits = {1,0,1,0,0,1,1,0,1,0};
for (int i = 0; ibits.length; i++)
{
result = 1;
result += bits[i];
}
cout result;
Aieeeeee! he's the antichrist!
I for one am quite pleased to see another QNX story. There are so many things about QNX that is 'done right'. It's amusing to read comments from people who dismiss it. So many interesting projects have been done using it. 1. QNX does predate linux by some time. I bought version 1.04 in 1981. QNX users were spoiled by the direct access to the developers they had during this time that raised everyone's bar about the level of Customer service that could be provided. 2. It runs spectacularily well on rather low end hardware, XT, 286, 386 3. The networking is seemless. For instance, if your serial port was tied up on your machine, use one on someone elses! All computer resources, including CPU (per task) was set up this way. It makes writing distributed apps easy. QNX is an excellent architecture. It does real- time extremely well. I encourage all you embedded app developers to take a look at it. Leo Binkowski lbinkowski@NOSPAM.drscape.com
For smp in QNX RtP check out http://staff.qnx.com/~cdm/smp/.
How about a working link? The address gets redirected to http://www.qnx.com/company/hr/index.html~cdm/smp/ which just doesn't work at all. I tried playing with various combinations but haven't got to anything except for a careers page.
That link does work. Might just be some tempory slashdot effect.
Dan Hildebrand (note the spelling) was hired to go work at Quantum Software in the late 80's. He originally worked at a firm here in Winnipeg called Vansco Electronics where I first met him. He raved about this neat thing called QNX and within weeks (and a beer or two :)) I was a convert.
I like to refer to him as my "mentor" as he was the man that first got me into Unix-ish OSs. Unfortunately Dan passed away in 1998. You can read the QNX page dedicated to him at:
http://www.qnx.com/danh/
I didn't keep in touch with him much after he left Winnipeg to move to Ottawa and QNX but I wouldn't be doing what I do had it not been for him.
Check your facts please.
grub
Trolling is a art,
We know all about the demo disk: hard real time, GUI, TCP/IP, web browser all on one bootable floppy. Now try doing that with Linux, a much newer OS. It used to be fashionable to deride Microsoft's "bloated" software, but now look at a similarly configured Linux setup. Linux is now so big that it's not funny. I am not trolling so much as asking what it is that keeps Linux from offering the kind of efficiency that QNX offers. Is there a fundamental barrier? Was Tanenbaum right after all in that famous exchange with Linus?
QNX, prounced I believe "QNIX", was originally created by Dan Hilderbrant back in the very early 80's and first ran on 8086 and 286 class machines. It was formed into Quantum Systems, a Canadian company, and was originally named "QNIX" until AT&T threatened to sue (which is why I believe that remains the correct pronounciation).
QN(i)X, unlike the name suggests, has no relationship to, code in common with, or even many concepts similar to UNIX systems. It was from the start a fully distributed and true realtime microkernel system using a common message passing architecture applied both locally and over a LAN whereby most services were user mode applications, including file systems and device drivers. In a number of ways QNX achieved much of what Plan 9 had hoped to, some 20 years earlier, and perhaps that is the most comperable system.
While there were many actually innovate ideas first used widely in QNX, unfortunately it has always been and remains essentially a proprietary system,and this seems both to have limited it's growth, and it's future potential substancially.
The proper pronunciation of QNX is kyoo-nihcks.
I gave QNX a whirl, along with Hard Hat Linux (embedded rtos) and Be.
Qnx was fast, but Be 'felt' faster. Be had support for my soundchips, but lacked support for wavelan802.11b . QNX lacked sound support and wavelan 802.11b
Hard Hat is coming along but needs work. Didn't 'feel' as fast as either of the other two. Haven't tried Lineo yet.
Granted, my soundchip was a cs4237b, and I can't really expect them to have wavelan available yet.
I'm sorry I haven't got real numbers to back up my early impressions of speed... but one of the biggest interface issues is, does the user get feedback that something has occurred? If it 'feels' slow, it is.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
yah, qnx. thats used in my state's decommissioned nuclear power plant (connecticut yankee nuclear power plant). go QNX ! ;)
No it is not pointless. As a professional software developer its nice to have a choice of Oses etc for use in projects, that way you pick the one that best fits your requirments and not have to shoe-horn an existing bloated os into a matchbox. And to be honest, these days Linux as used on a desktop pc is starting to gradually suffer from bloat.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
"Real Time" simply means that the system will respond within a specified time. It does not necessarily mean that the kernel can be pre-empted, nor does the fact that the kernel can be pre-empted necessarily mean that an operating system is realtime.
I wish the home electronics manufacturers would at least start shipping with the option of an ethernet port that configs offa DHCP...
Hum.. if this machine is called Audrey, then presumably the next version of it will be the Audrey 2, at which point we really need to start wondering about 3Com's plans for world domination.
In 1982, I ported one of the earliest MUDS (Scepter, 1979) from a Cyber 6000 mainframe to a PC using QNX. It supported sixteen users on an IBM PC XT (4Mhz 8-bit 8088 CPU). And no stinking 16650 FIFOs. With 1-character-per-interrupt, 16 users merrily MUD'ed away at 2400 baud.
In addition to the MUD we offered chat rooms, e-mail, and two other multi-player games (Diplomacy and Space Combat). We charged $2.99 an hour. It paid my way through college.
Don't believe it? Telnet to drscape.com. To this day it still runs on a 4Mhz PC XT with QNX 1.14.
Alan Klietz
Author, Scepter of Goth on QNX
alank@algintech.NOSPAM.com
Since when is QNX developed by 3com. Does anyone have anything to back this up? It seems to me that QNX has been around a lot longer than 3com has been. Does anyone know the full (true) story of it's history.
Does my bum look big in this?
Boy I would not try comparing Linux et al. kernel modules to a truely modular architecture. The interface of the kernel modules makes them incredibly fragile, requiring recompilation with every new minor version of the kernel, even when certain kernel options have been activated. QNX services have a relationship to the kernel much like *nix demons do: sure, they use the kernel, but if you change the kernel around a bit, you don't need new demons, unless you want to employ some new kernel feature.
/not/ be the way to go. You should build all the modules you will need into a custom kernel, then place a statically linked executable next to it.
Frankly, the module system in FreeBSD, Linux, and others is more of a convenient way of keeping portions of the kernel out of memory unless you have a use for it. QNX's big advantage here is the layer of abstraction between these services and the microkernel, using their extremely efficient messaging systems.
And for the record, if you wanted to make a Linux app fit on a floppy, modules would
Weapons of Mass Analysis
Isn't that funny? I saw this article about the time those QNX banner ads began appearing at the top of the page.
Wonder why that could be...
It may not be as good for skinning as a proper hunting knife, but it also has a saw, a can opener, a magnifying glass, and many other useful tools that you might need some day. Think about it.
The last thing I take with me camping is something I won't use.
There's a term called 'better for the job' which applies here.
I could care less if linux runs on a PDA. What I do care about, is having what works best on a PDA on a PDA, not what can be ported to work on a PDA.
QNX is made to run on a small system.
Your average linux DESKTOP box takes roughly 400 floppy disks, if you include the base, gnome or KDE, and yoru various desktop utilities. And we haven't even gotten into "applications" yet.
But QNX does that in 1.
for teh love of god zealots, think outside of the box.
-Erik-
A couple of months ago, Handhelds.org had reported getting XFree down to 400k on the iPaq platform. I have no idea what the footprint is now, or what the 400k referred to, disk or memory.
Regardless, there is much cruft in XFree, even 4.x, and most people read the memory usage wrong. It's not a bad X platform, and could easily fit on a disk, a la Photon (although I believe that's X+a WM)
--
Evan (Who used three X Servers before choosing XFree).
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
a!b!c! = as far as you got when learning to read. How appropriate.
grab your ankles bitch
Just yesterday. BeOS.
--
Queue-nucks = comibination of quebec and canucks. How appropriate.
Anybody out there using inferno or plan 9?
Viva the obscure OS's
See those words at the top of the page?
That's called an "a r t i c l e".
If you read it you will find a "link" to their "homepage".
There you will be embarrassed to learn that your comment makes no sense.
If only you weren't so american...um...I mean stupid.
grab your ankles bitch
Qnx Neutrino supports Mips, PowerPC, x86 and I heard about Arm/StrongArm support but haven't seen much about it. Their latest releases are x86 only but I hope they don't completely drop the other architechtures for Qnx RTP and beyond.
My mistake... I was certain that it was x86 only. This is good if it isn't!
Every one seems to be missing the point.
Qnx is a small and fully functional OS.
It has a super fast gui.
It works good, its clean, neat.
Has good audio video support.(I could play 4 mpeg video's at once, in linux I can't play one and get a good frame rate )
Ok hardware support and very easy configuration.(there is pretty much none, true pnp)
The real time support is just iceing on the cake.
With a little more software(corel wp, a good irc client) QNX could become my desktop or laptop OS.
God, root, what is the difference?
Read more about this non open-source OS in a ZDNet story here."
:-/
Ever read that Onion story about they gay man that saved a girl's life when her house caught fire? They went on and on about the hero (who likes to hug and kiss other men) that selflessly put her life ahead of his own.
don't know why that came to mind just now
-------
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I've been using QNX RTP for almost 3 weeks with the SMP kernel, and it's sooo nice! I didn't see anyone who mentioned it, but a good place to go for software and tech support is www.qnxstart.com, and the extremely helpful people in #QNX on EfNet.
The whole 16-player MUD game (Scepter of Goth) fit on a single 320K diskette with the OS (QNX). I used to bicycle the diskette from my home PC (8088Mhz) to the office system located 3 miles away (which had the 16 phone rotary).
-Alan
If Linux isn't suitable for embedded applications, several groups out there have already proven that it in fact can be made to fit in a nice small space right nicely. IBM's proof of concept linux-on-a-watch is a good example, or the promised linux PDA, Yopy...heck, look at all the people who spent their summer taking the netpliance i-opener, or the websurfer pro and putting linux on them. Sure, plenty of people installed hard drives in those beasts, but there was more than a handful that didn't go that route and just dumped a linux partition image onto the Sandisk disk-on-chip device. Enough people so as to make it practical for a group to make a prefab image known as Jailbait to stick in there under the 16MB limit....with more programs/functionality than netpliance's gimpy little QNX image (btw, for anyone who's itching for another pronunciation war, I pronounce it Kyoo-Enn-Ecks)
So secondary storage isn't a problem...perhaps you're talking about primary storage and the wonderful universe of volatile memory? The i-opener has 32MB. My laptop has less than that, and I've never seen a problem with it. Perhaps you were talking about something like those Xerox copiers that use an embedded linux kernel buried deep inside that I read about a few years ago.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that the behavior of linux on your desktop is going to be the same as linux aimed for a cramped enviroment. Ever tried to see how small you can make a kernel? Try taking out all filesystem support. Or PCI support. Make sure you aren't supporting the old a.out binaries. Or plug and play devices. Or floppy disk drives. Or any IP-related stuff that isn't necessary for a non-server. Most of these devices thus far have excluded ethernet cards, so unless your device is among the first to do so, you won't need it here. How bad do you need the console support on a machine that won't have people ever seeing the console?
So now that you've got your stripped kernel, what if it's too big? Why not go through the source and trim it even more? Who needs a source license and NDA's up the wazoo just to make it work on a prototype platform?
ok, so maybe Linux isn't the answer for everything and everybody...but to make a general statement like "Linux is not really suitable for small embedded applications, since it has a large" (you never actually finished this sentence, it's that vague...) says exactly nothing. Add to that your assumption that these devices have less memory than a fair amount of them do...and we have BLATANT UNPROVED ASSERTIONS! Whee!
Come back when you have some facts to back these up.
-transiit
The big reason I haven't gotten into QNX is their lack of using the GNU toolchain. Now I noticed someone here mentioned that QNX is older than GNU (established 1983-84), which would explain why they didn't use it off-the-bat. But you would have figured that they would have moved over to the GNU toolchain sometime since. Expecially in light of numerous other, commercial RTOS' use of the GNU toolchain (e.g., VxWorks).
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
One free example of a mature non-toy QNX-like OS is Doug Comer's XINU. One big advantage XINU. has over QNX is that it is free. Another is that XINU is well documented in text books. Another advantage is that XINU has one of the best implementations of TCP/IP available (thoroughly documented in several text books). Another is that XINU works with the many dozens of Russ Nelson's GNU Crynwr packet drivers. If you are looking for something QNX-like but free, chose XINU.
This is heavily compressed; I'm not sure how big the actual system will be, but it must be considerably more than 1.44megs.
and as for the GUI... the QNX GUI isn't particularly advanced. I once wrote a GUI with similar functionality in less than 5000 lines of QuickBasic code.
No one has mentioned the coolest things about QNX -- notably its architecture. QNX is a highly reliable, real-time OS based on message passing. It really is a microkernel OS. Even device and filesystem drivers run in userspace. This makes it incredibly stable, as you can actually crash a driver, restart it, and keep going. You can also upgrade subsystems without taking the machine offline. QNX is used in systems that cannot fail, such as heart monitors.
It's also really efficiently written, and almost completely modular (as opposed to Linux' monolithic-plus-kitchen-sink approach). Their 1.44MB Floppy demo contains the bootloader and kernel, a GUI, a web wrowser, tcp/ip and PPP. No other OS can do that, because they're too bloated. Linux can be put in a floppy, but there's no way to fit a GUI and a web browser as well. YOu might be able to chuck out things like the shell and libc, and include a statically-linked version of lynx, but nothing as good as the QNX demo can be achieved.
QNX is much more suitable for PDAs and otehr small systems than is Linux. It's loads more reliable, more easily upgradable, and much more compact. Just look at the iOpener; into 16MB they fit the OS, a custom GUI built on top of the QNX GUI, web browser, email, telnet server, and other things, and hadspace left over to store files. The only other OS that could do that is WinCE, and it's much more limited than QNX (such as a limit of 32 processes, 22 of which are consumed by the system itself).
QNX rocks!
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I downloaded and installed QNX a while ago, but could not figure out how to use SMP.
Also this QNX 4 and QNX Neutrino confuse me. What's the differences? I can't figure it out from their web-pages.
Anyone?
The specs on these "internet appliances" are pathetic: usually, they have some dirt-cheap CPU (usually Cyrix, National Semiconductor, or an IDT WinChip clocked near 180MHz). For RAM, the norm is 32MB, sometimes even less. Some of these POS's don't even have a hard drive, but those that do often have standard PC hardware inside. The hardware piece itself costs almost nothing by itself; it's the damned service that reaps in the profit for the company (which is why Netpliance is so strict about the ISP contract).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
You stupid bonehead. The Win95 installer boot disk is just a system disk (io.sys,msdos.sys,command.com) with enough support to barely recognize a cd-rom drive (made much easier when most cd drives went atapi) It then calls setup.exe on the cd drive. You pull this one out of your ass or something?
-transiit
The point was lost by people who give kneejerk responses without being troubled to read or think about the comments.
So, to summarize...
Assertion 1: Linux is too big for embedded devices
Response: There is nothing inherently bloated about the linux kernel that it can't be trimmed down to fit whereever it needs to
Assertion 2: Well, QNX can fit a GUI and a Browser on a floppy! Linux can't do that, right?
Response: The linux kernel is small enough that you could fit it on a floppy with enough space for your custom GUI and browser
Assertion 3: You don't need to do that because QNX did this years ago
Response: Yeah, no shit. See assertion 2.
Assertion 4: Transiit is a retarded zealot.
Response: Maybe. Not in this case tho...the point was that it CAN be done with linux, not that it HAS been done with linux. Somebody claimed linux was inherently incapable of doing a certain task. This has nothing to do with zealotry. This was a (misguided) attempt to clarify someone's mistaken assumption.
Leave the herd behind. Just because popular opinion loved linux last week or hate linux this week should have very little bearing on your own opinions. Think for yourselves. If you like W2k, use it. If you like QNX, use it. If you like BeOS, use it. Someone defending their own choice does not make for zealotry though.
If you can get tcl/tk to compile in QNX, you can get TiK to work in QNX.
therefore, if you want an aol instant messaging client in QNX, all you have to do is get tcl/tk.
i'm probably going to try this in the next week or two, but since you've already got a qnx system you can probably try sooner.
ta ta, and enjoy TiK if you get tcl/tk to work 8)
--brian
It didn't seem to me that anywhere in the article it was mentioned that they are even interested in becoming a general OS such as Linux or *BSD. All the products mentioned were embedded applications. They have a long and distinguished track record in doing things like running nuclear power plants where you definitely don't want to be running Windows.
Do this don't do that Can't you redesign.
I would reccomend anyone to check out the demo disk of QNX. For those of you who haven't , prepare to be amazed (well, kinda!). It has TCP/IP networking, a nice web browser, and loads of stuff play around with, all on one disk! I played with it last year and I could even get 800x640x16bit colour on my TNT2, at a time when getting X-Windows to work with it was still a nightmare.
When you see you mailcarrier note the bundle of mail in his hand. It is sorted by QNX. QNX powers whe letter sorting machines at the US Postal Service. (@ 40k letters per hour) I deal with it everyday, and QNX never gives us a bit of trouble. If there is a problem with the sorted mail, it is not from the program, but from a worn belt, bad zip, or a OCR out of adjustment. I have seen the geeks who repair our computers go from Windows zombies into QNX fans. They are even complaining that open source solution were not considered by the Postal service.
BTW, they Love WebObjects. It powers the Postal Services intranet.
photosMy Photostream
(This is completely off-topic but had to post anyway)
Actually you don't have to boot Windows to play Counter-Strike. Half-Life works with WINE under Linux with modern 3Dfx, nVidia or Matrox card for sure. I'm not 100% sure about FreeBSD, though. Check out Emulated Half-Life for downloadable scripts but you don't have to be a guru type to figure out how to run it yourself.
I personally prefer the direct link... something like a "serial" cable, but "parallel" works as well ;)
- Bill
If you want to try out this *very* small operating system, you can make yourself a demo disk here. The demodisk is a standard 1.44 meg floppy, used as a boot disk, and has a full microkernal architecture, a GUI, a web browser, 3d vector animation support, and a text editor. All on a floppy disk.
There just isn't that much left to dazzle us with.
--
Vote Homer Simpson for President!
It looks impressive; I haven't tried it yet, but I think the reason it IS making inroads is because it is free AND it doesn't have that much competition for its market. Conversely, BeOS, although also free, isn't doing nearly as well because of the competition it faces.
As much as I love Linux, it would seriously have to be stripped down to compete with QNX; the kernel itself is way too bloated. However, I realize that there *is* an embedded Linux project, and I haven't messed much with that, either, although I'd be very interested to see a comparison.
I think I could cram as much functionality onto a 1.44MB floppy, but I'd probably be using DOS, or a non-X GUI on Linux, to keep it light. (maybe a suite of SVGALib programs instead?)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Linux is just starting to make inroads. It seems pointless (to me) that another OS should be pushed like this. Economies of scale people.
DISCLAIMER: This is MY opinion. I'm not telling you what's right, wrong, whatever. I might be wrong. I'm probably right. Please tell me, either way.
Cheers,
Daniel.
--
Daniel Zeaiter
daniel@academytiles.com.au
http://www.academytiles.com.au
ICQ: 16889511
The QNX site does not seem to document what platforms their OS runs on in any obvious place. However, I suspect many simple embedded systems lack all the hardware to keep a RTOS like that running, and it would be pointless to use more expensive components(like processors which support protected mode, for example) just to use a pre-made operating system. Will developers widely accept a "microkernel" platform, when they could get it to work with a small amount of code and probably less hastle anyway(or go the next step up and use a more complete platform)?
X-Has-Sig: yes
Wehn I was in High School, I had a co-op job fixing ICONS. Built like tanks they were. The ICON 1's had usually 512k of ram, but it was all socketed, so after alot of turning on and off, they'd quit working and you'd have to open up the beast and push down the chips. The 1's could also accomodate a 5.25" floppy drive, but it heated the thing up like a boiler, and usually it would fail in a year or less unless you added a second fan to it (not officially supported by CEMCORP / Unisys).
Also, the keyboard controller chips were socketed, and built in VERY cheap sockets - they'd crack from heat changes, so we usually desoldered the sockets and soldered the chips right onto the boards. The keys themselves also failed fairly commonly, and had to be replaced.
The other big problem was the trackballs... They were in their own sealed "cube" inside the chassis, and the dirt would just build up inside. They were a wheeled optical encoder type, so the dirt would eventually obsure the sensors and they'd stop. Fixable with some compressed air and a q-tip usually. It was connected with a ribon cable that was a pain in the ass to un-hook if I remember properly.
The install of QNX was also really buggy... little to no security, and there was a really cool trick I discovered once that was a huge security violation: after someone logged out of a station (it wouldn't work if the station was power cycled) and the login: prompt was sitting there, you could hold down the control key, and press the keys ASDFGHJKL one at a time, and then go to the next row with ZX and then C it would drop you back into the previous persons account, at the familliar % prompt! once word of that got around, the staff became VERY paranoid...
Good times.
-ben
Some people are only alive because it's illegal to kill them.
Take one a Transmeta chip, an IBM 1 GB Microdrive, a USB port, an audio out, a wireless modem, and a small color screen. Knead into a small handheld loaf. Simmer in fresh basil over medium Lithium-Ion heat. Add QNX. Strain, shake vigorously, and serve. Best when served fresh or even chilled. Serves one.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Why are most pro-QNX comments modded down to 0 when they in fact, are correcting misinformation provided by the original poster? Who mods the moderators?
So QNX is not like Linux, so it's not good?
/usr/X11/lib like Linux's. Not only it is its famed tasking that makes it what it is, but also its solidity. Yes Linux is solid too, but Linux is just the name of the kernel, all the rest can fall over because of a bad mix of patches and apps in a distrubution, so what kernel version, what binutils, what libc are the right one to use again? Even RedHat and SUSE seem to have completely lost track of it.
I am quite surprised that people choose to judge QNX by it's GUI when it actualy is what is under the hood that makes it what it is. Most telecom places where I had a contract, wether for exchanges or GPIB GPS stuff were used, there was a little tiny little QNX box doing the magic. And mostly with an ASCII only terminal pulgged to it, no need of mostrous
QNX does offer a very reliable OS out of the package for people looking for a little beige rackmounted box everybody forgets for 300 days but that brings the whole show down the day it is rebooted. We are talking traffic control, we are talking industrial processes here, all the stuff RT-Linux also concentrate on. Not netscape or Quake speed.
Would have been nice to see some post from industrial enginners or specialized SysAdmins.
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
Graphics3D 640, 480
We would have moved onto QNX 4 (the first Unix-like version) but the licencing costs were horrific. I hope QNX have seen sense since then.
The original ICON was built by a firm called CEMCORP, Canadian Educational Microprocessors (or Microcomputers, but I think it was the former) specifically for the Canadian educational market. IIRC they were 8086's with about 512K or 640K of RAM, and CGA graphics but done in an unusual configuration, not PC standard. They were the large square chassis built with military grade steel and had an integrated keyboard with a trackball on the right, with an "Action" key for the mouse button. They were ridiculously overbuilt. The ICON's were workstations running over Arcnet (ICONNET) IIRC, into a fileserver called the Lexicon, which carried a 30MByte hard disk interfaced via ESDI or ST506 MFM.
The next-gen ICON was the ICON2, built by Unisys using an 80186, in the grey single piece monitor/CPU and the detachable keyboard/trackball unit. Some ICON2's integrated SCSI IIRC to host an LMSI single speed CDRom reader. Apparently there was an ICON3 which was a 80386, but IIRC it was a basic Unisys clone PC. The Unisys icons eventually allowed for emulation of MSDOS but it was painfully slow.
The ICON system ran QNX on both the ICON and LEXICON in a full multiuser configuration. There was a graphical layer, called Ambience, and a number of nifty programs (I really like the paint package, it made me buy an Amiga later on) mostly written by the Ontario government and University of Waterloo.
The machines were ridiculously slow-because of the reliance on the LEXICON and the slow 2MBps network. If the Lexicon crashed (and it did regularily) the entire system needed to rebooted, which took 15 minutes plus. Needless to say this wasn't popular with teachers with only 30 minute class periods. The hardware, at least mechanically, was extremely well designed. The machines were obviously designed for the classroom, and I can't remember a machine being damaged physically-they knew the target market well-the keyboards had oversized areas to get to the trackball, they were relatively indestructable, and they had headphone jacks up front for quiet use.
ICONS were very far ahead in concept (each student was suppsoed to have their own workspace, true multiuser, each teacher could look at each student) but poorly implemented (poor training, not enough time to set everything up properly). Improper administrator (usually the school librarian or a really bright kid) and/or teacher training made it even worse. I remember learning all about it when the school VP let me (at age 12) read all the QNX manuals.
Calum The ICON's were
eCos Product Page.
eCos Development Page
Currently working with it for a NAS solution. Have also used QNX Neutrino and WindRiver VxWorks.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
It's NOT LINUX!!
It's good to have choice. That's why we have a bazillion window managers and theming skinnable apps that give you a billion ways to dump core. >:(
But aside from the bland "choice is good" mantra, QNX has definite good qualities of its own - it's very lightweight, very fast, has a decent GUI system going for it (despite not having DND, which I deem a semi-serious flaw, but one that could be tackled), and it could teach other people a thing or two yet with the way it does stuff. And even if it doesn't even have anything to teach, it's still a potentially very useful OS to run on one's computer. Time will tell. Time and apps.
Don't dump on it (yet).
GAIN EVERLASTING LIFE!
"...And unlike Linux, which requires licensers to provide source-code changes back to the community," That's overstating the case a bit, isn't it? I mean, if you're a company given a black box (namely, the linux or QNX kernel) that does X and you want to do some superset Y of X, typically you don't need to modify X to do Y as well. In other words, you can make another, seperate program performing these functions. Hell, you can even make a seperate loadable driver for the kernel, like VMware does... So really, assuming there are no bugs in the implementation of X, you don't need to release your work publicly. You only need to release your work publicly if you make a change that really benefits everyone... And the harm in that from a competitive firm's point of view is pretty minimal (ex: you tweak the memory management system, so now your competitors can manage memory a little faster. Big whoop...)
No, I don't see how my love of sucking cock has any relevance here. I'm glad you don't care.
-lx
i've seen this one floppy demo disk running few times and it's really amazing in todays world of operating systems taking up to about gigabyte of hd space on default installation, like win2k. and even better, most modern operating systems need all the time more and more memory and cpu power - i think it would be logical to study how to make these giants use hardware more optimized, rather than to add more features.
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
Huh? That's what they said. They sound the same. (Assuming silent u, which I'm guessing they are.)
I'm sure the irony's lost on you there, a real shame.
"get a life, Dorkus Maximus". What, like you?
I have a confession to make. I'm an operating systems slut; I'm not proud of it. In the last year alone, I've fooled around with a huge number of Linux distros, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, iBSD, Solaris, SCO UnixWare 7, BeOS PE, Win 98, Win ME, and Win 2000 Beta 3. Linux and I had a long term relationship forming, until along came QNX.
QNX RTP installed beautifully in a matter of minutes, and as far as I'm concerned, the windowing system (Photon) is just gorgeous, and incredibly fast as well. Luckily, all my hardware was supported (better than BeOS, which was a hassle!) and I was on the internet and listening to mp3s in a matter of a few minutes.
QNX RTP comes with what is perhaps one of the best development tools that I have ever seen, named PhAB. Personally, being a bit of a sucker for punishment, I opted to take the difficult way out and program for QNX RTP using our good friends C, emacs, make, etc... The GUI toolkit, Photon microGUI, is very Motif-like (which some of you will hate, and some of you will love). Personally, I love it and I've been busily coding QNX apps ever since it was released.
There are already a lot of apps ported to QNX, with more and more being added by the day. Emacs, Abiword, Realplayer, Samba, teTeX, ghostscript, Mozilla, and the list goes on and on (and on).
I'm tired of the unstable nature and bloatedness of X. QNX RTP, in my opinion, a far better user experience from beginning to end.
BTW, for those of you wondering, QSSL (QNX Software Systems Limited) is a Kanata based company. Kanata is a suburb in the west end of Ottawa.
For those of you complaining about hardware, or DND, etc... keep in mind that the current release is a preview release (read: BETA). I am told that the next release will include a far greater number of drivers and who knows what else.
v
I meant to say BSDi, not iBSD. I guess that's what happens when you take muscle relaxants for a pinched nerve ;p
i seem to remember this os from an advanced os course, and isn't its claim to fame that it is (or can be used as) a "real-time" os?
Ranessin
QNX never suffered from a lack of technical merits. Its main problem was a certain marketing arrogance on the side of the parent company. They simply were never terribly interested in selling QNX to mere mortals. If a prospective licensee wasn't going to embed it in at least 10 million units or what have you, they simply didn't show any interest. My previous company wanted to use it in an embedded networked device for industrial control. But since the projected volume was very low (hundreds of units a year max), the prices quoted for QNX were stratospheric, so we went with PharLap instead. Can't say I was happy with the choice--Linux would have been much more flexible, albeit more bloated--but for a device selling for $500 it doesn't make any sense to pay half that just for OS royalties.
While I've heard all the arguments from QNX fans as to why this marketing model makes sense, it doesn't change the fact that an OS copy not sold is money lost, either way you look at it. How could they possibly be better off not selling me the OS at all, versus licensing it at $50 or so a pop? They should simply introduce a layered support mechanism, giving more support to those who pay more, and less (mailing lists, FAQs, KBs etc) to those who pay less.
Worth mentioning that QNX RTP is available for download from their site. Gave it a try about a week ago, and it does have its good points - i went from booting the CD to being up and running in about 10-15 minutes, with network and graphics configs as well. Nice. They have a nifty little web browser, and REALLY nice package management - Linux could learn a thing or two from it. They have a reasonable amount of software, the interface is pretty responsive, and it's pretty easy to use.
The downsides - I hate the filesystem layout - it's really confusing, moreso than other unices. The interface is allright, but it's not as well designed as other ones I've tried. It'll be cool for embedded applications, but as a desktop OS, which is more what RTP is, it doesn't beat *BSD/Linux or BeOS. What's frustrating is that they've been able to garner a lot of support from other vendors, having a JVM and Flash and RealPlayer, Quake III (!) and lots of hardware support, compared to BeOS which is just now getting these things and has had lots of problems with hardware vendors.
All in all, I reccomend giving it a try, but I don't think I'd use it regularly. Between BeOS and FreeBSD, all my needs are pretty much satisfied. Well, cept for when I need to boot Windows to play Counter-Strike.
-lx
I've tried QNX for a couple of weeks now and I like it.
Altho compiling stuff has been a bit of a prob, but I'm no ace anyways, so maybe it's me.
Too bad it isn't really free.
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska