QNX RtP 6.2 World Preview

QNX goes back a *long* way by InterruptDescriptorT · 2002-01-21 03:11 · Score: 5, Interesting

Do any Canadians (perhaps only Ontarians) remember the ICON computers they used to have in elementary and high schools? The ICON, also known as the 'Bionic Beaver', was a computer manufactured by CEMCorp (Canadian Educational Microprocessor, IIRC) that was meant to bring data processing and computer skills to thousands of high-school students.

The design of the machine was interesting--intelligent nodes running an 80186 connected by ArcNet to a central server node--but they ran a version of QNX. I remember the slightly different set of commands than we are familiar with in UNIX: for example, to go up a directory, it was 'cd ^', files could be deleted with 'zap', and commands could be easily run on remote nodes by prefixing the command with [nodenum].

It was on this machine and OS that I cut my teeth in C, 80x86 assembly and basic networking concepts (I wrote a small multi-node chat program using the virtual circuit calls in QNX), and as such I was always have very fond memories of it. Thanks for letting me reminisce. :-) (BTW, if anyone has one and is planning on getting rid of it, I'd gladly take it off your hands.)

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Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)

Re:QNX goes back a *long* way by B1 · 2002-01-21 03:57 · Score: 2, Interesting

Our school had them (Oakville Trafalgar High School... class of 92).

I fondly remember the 'ipaint' program on the ICONS--that program where you could create vector-based animation by drawing key frames. Also, there was that really cool chemistry lab program.

Most of the kids at school grudgingly used them--I remember it had some sort of 'PC Compatibility' mode, and they tried to teach kids WordPerfect on them. Wordperfect under the DOS compatibility mode was brutally slow though--felt a bit like wading through a pool of bubblegum. I tried to stay away from them as much as possible.

I had one friend that waded through the reference manuals for the ICON, and actually did quite a bit of development under them. That was like him though--always wanting to figure out what made things tick. While most of us were content with DOS, he was mastering UNIX, QNX, C, and this wierd thing called 'Usenet'. I can honestly say he knew more about the ICON than anybody else at the school, including the Comp. Sci teacher/sysadmin.

There's no doubt there was some inner beauty to the ICON--certainly, it was a very interesting network architecture. Alas, this was all hidden behind horrific applications and a cumbersome user interface.

I think the ICON is what you get when you let the government design computers. All the right features, on paper they should have been great...terrible execution though.

A microkernel that doesnt suck by Koim-Do · 2002-01-21 03:20 · Score: 2, Interesting

I generally know that the Neutrino microkernel is faster than Mach, but have anyone ever made (and published the results of) performance comparision between Neutrino, Mach and L4 ?

Who is this reviewer? by djweis · 2002-01-21 03:23 · Score: 2, Interesting

Does he have any background in embedded systems? He seems about as qualified as me reviewing pacemakers. I think prettiness is overrated in a system like this.

A simple OS for mom by Pengo · 2002-01-21 03:32 · Score: 3, Interesting

Maybe this is it. Show her how to dial up with the modem, use launch the email client and web client and find a version of AIM and there you go. I imagine that because it's UNIX(like), you should be able to run it non-priviliged without problems or fear of someone else messing it up.

Has anyone tried running this on slow hardware? (Such as a P133 or something w/32 megs ram?) How does it fare?

Re:A simple OS for mom by nhavar · 2002-01-21 03:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

The slowest machine I've set this up on is a P75 w/32 megs of ram. It worked fine although with the video card I had it couldn't get to higher color depths. Amazingly I didn't have to do anything to configure the modem, sound card or NIC and everything ran fine. Really helped a novice get on the net quick and play a few games that they like to play. No need to spend $600 for a new PC just so someone can surf the net and get mail and play card games, dust off the old PC and slap QNX on easier than a Mandrake install.

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"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon

Re:Why would anyone use by boris_the_hacker · 2002-01-21 03:36 · Score: 2, Interesting

I think the point of the GUI is to allow for a self contained system in which to develop products using QNX. This is a nice idea as it allows you to compile, run, test, debug rather than compile, transfer, run, debug [remote/local]. Where the transfer stage adds yet another stepping stone in the development cycle (ok for large changes, but if you are tracking down a small bug it's a PITA).

From the article it seems like the tools and apps that are for QNX RTP are there to make the developers life less painfull (eg. the media application) and it's not for a general purpose desktop - and why can't developers have a nice GUI?

Just my 2 pence.

Regards, Chris

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chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk

Re:Why would anyone use by corrosiv · 2002-01-21 03:37 · Score: 2, Interesting

1 - self hosted development: it is generally intended to be the embedded developer's desktop system, not a general purpose desktop system

2 - GUIs are frequently used in embedded/realtime systems. Factory control systems, health monitoring & analysis, PDAs.

My $0.02 (Canadian)

Very Cool by TRoLLaXoR · 2002-01-21 03:38 · Score: 1, Interesting

Having run QNX RtP 6.0 and 6.1, I have to say I'm waiting with baited breath.

6.0 was excellent, but patch B killed TCP/IP networking. Either that or the driver for my NIC was bad. Performance was good on even 32 MB RAM.

6.1 was an improvement mostly in the details: small little useful features were added, driver support was added, performance tweaks were added (try playing 32 MP3s simultanesouly on a Windows 2000 box with just 32 mgs of RAM!), and overall it was what one would expect from a secondary release.

If 6.2 is anything to 6.1 like 6.1 was to 6.0, I'd say the QNX guys had found the right pace, although it'd be nicer to have these updates every 6-9 months instead of every 9-12 months.

I'm running QNX RtP 6.1 on a dual Pentium Pro system, each proc has the 1-meg L2 cache and is overclocked to 233MHz, and 32 megs of RAM (going to a gig soon).

Re:Hello Point... you've missed it. by ergo98 · 2002-01-21 03:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

You're totally wrong. QNX Neutrino is a bottom to top OS from tiny machines to clusters of high power hardware. QNX has pushed their OS on thin-cients, Internet Appliances, etc, it isn't just for embedded monitoring hardware. Indeed the big QNX push is "QNX on a floppy" that basically turns a PC into an IA.

QNX: longtime (semi) embedded player by RatOmeter · 2002-01-21 04:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

As has been pointed out in other post(s), QNX has been around a long time. In fact, they first called it Qunix, but AT&T (Bell Labs) slapped'm down on that long ago.

I'm heard first-hand testimonials attesting to its bullet-proof operation which makes it a great choice for controlling machinery. You can also install, de-install just about any service/driver/app without needing to reboot.

Where I work, we make large, expensive automated testing equipment (lotsa horsepower, moving parts, other dangerous shit). We wanted to eval QNX about 3 years ago, but they told me they only provide free eval copies to their $100K plus customers. We make about 7 to 12 machines per year; they slammed the door in my face.

Now (and their previous free non-comm version) that the've got a pkg I can use to eval, it's too late. Even if we were still in a position to choose QNX, I doubt we'd easily forget our previous snubbing.

Some hangups. by be-fan · 2002-01-21 04:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

QNX RtP has tons of potential, but there are lots of things holding it back as a desktop OS:

1) Lack of unified VM/buffer-cache. The size of the disk cache is fixed rather than dynamically adjusted depending on need.

2) Lack of proper swapping. Since swapping kills embedded apps, RtP lacks good swapping. Use of swap has to be explicitly coded into the app, and was implemented as sort of a hack to allow gcc to be self-hosted.

3) Real-time scheduler. The hard-real time scheduler might be nice on an embedded system, but on a desktop system (where fairness takes a back seat to user-percieved responsiveness) it doesn't work well.

4) Crappy disk subsystem. I don't know if this problem has been fixed in 6.2 (I doubt it) but RtP has a really slow disk system. The IDE drivers have issues and the filesystem is ancient.

Some of the numbers that RtP shows aren't as impressive as they could be. 0.55us context switches sound great, but Linux can do switches on that order as well. Still, RtP is a great system. QNet, in particular, is very featureful, and Photon totally destroys X in every area except maybe 3D support. It has superlative network transparency, a good (fast) widget set, incredible fonts (courtesy of BitStream's FontFusion) and a nice, lean, architecture. If QSSL would port Photon to Linux (which wouldn't be that hard, given that both are mostly straight POSIX) I'd pay to run it.

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A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...

Re:Some hangups. by Sloppy · 2002-01-21 04:37 · Score: 3, Interesting

Real-time scheduler. The hard-real time scheduler might be nice on an embedded system, but on a desktop system (where fairness takes a back seat to user-percieved responsiveness) it doesn't work well.

Huh? Fairness is the enemy of responsiveness. There is no back-seat. On an RT system, if you have your UI run at a higher priority than your cpu-sucking apps, you get responsiveness that Windows/Linux users can only dream about.

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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.

Internet Appliance != Desktop by MosesJones · 2002-01-21 04:15 · Score: 4, Interesting

And an internet appliance is a minimal spec box, possibly without a hard-disk that has a cheap screen (possibly touch screen). Again its not aimed at the Microsoft market so the original point still holds. The cluster stuff is for specific tasks and not the desktop. The point is quite simple. Not every OS out there is meant to run the same way as windows, there is a wonderful world out there of OSes that are aimed at different tasks, all too often Slashdot is concerned, and its readership only aware, of the MS style of market.

OS/390, AS/400, EPOC, QNX etc etc etc... well cool OSes for paticular circumstances.

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An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi

Alas, QNX! by fm6 · 2002-01-21 04:21 · Score: 3, Interesting

Never heard of these machines, but as you describe them, their design makes a lot of sense. At about that time, I was working for Convergent Technologies, which mostly made systems that ran CTOS. Like QNX, CTOS had a message-passing architecture, and was thus very well-suited to distributed computing. QNX has always struck me as more elegant than CTOS, though.

When I left Convergent, I ended up working with 8086 and 80286 systems -- and found the limitations of MS-DOS really painful. QNX was then being marketed as a DOS alternative. They claimed to be able to do serious multitasking on 8 mhz systems. I actually found that claim credible, not to mention tantalizing. But I never got a chance to test it. The QNX license fees were just too high.

It's a real pity QNX wasn't in the picture when IBM was shopping around for a PC OS. History would be very different!

A Seriously cheap way to get 'net connected! by FyRE666 · 2002-01-21 04:37 · Score: 2, Interesting

Since you can now pick up old Compaq Internet Appliances for as little as $39 dollars (233/266mhz, 32MB RAM, 32MB Flash, 800x600 TFT screen), I'm sure QNX could be hacked into one of these to make a very usable and cool looking little browser/terminal! I believe it was also used in the original iopener devices, which had similar specs.

It's a pity Be crashed out of the embedded market really; their BeIA operating system was amazingly efficient. We were developing a system using the Compaq devices as shop terminals, (the versions we had included ethernet ports) and even when running telnetd, ftpd, the desktop (tracker) and the Opera browser, they were using like 18-20MB of their 32MB RAM! Pretty fast too, they could play Flash 4 animations at a decent speed even with pretty slow processors. An interesting thing about the Opera browser on the BeIA platform was that it gradually leaked memory, losing a little every time a new page was loaded. Once the device was over 90-92% memory usage, the browser was killed, and respawned. However, the user wouldn't notice this, as when the browser was killed, it left its image on the screen, then reloaded the last page visited so it was just a slight delay!

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Code, Hardware, stuff like that.

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