QNX RtP 6.2 World Preview

Jason writes: "OSNews is running an exclusive preview of the brand new version 6.2 of the QNX realtime operating system. The article is going through the installation process, the Photon user interface (lots of screenshots included), the internals, and the advantages and disadvantages of the OS as a desktop system. QNX RtP 6.2 is expected to be released for free (for non commercial usage) before March."

Comments

QNX goes back a *long* way

[InterruptDescriptorT]

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.)

Re:Hello Point... you've missed it.

[ergo98]

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.

Re:A simple OS for mom

[nhavar]

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.

Some hangups.

[be-fan]

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.