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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."
Real time OS's Have Issues with performance on the desktop, just as desktop/server OS's Have Issues in the real time space.
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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.
:-) (BTW, if anyone has one and is planning on getting rid of it, I'd gladly take it off your hands.)
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.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
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 ?
- Does the calculator have a paste feature? This is something really lacking in KDE's one. And it bugs me when I can't be bothered adding two file sizes together (or typing the sizes into the calculator)
- Will the interface always be as consistent as it is in the screenshots? - the Macs at school always had consistent user interfaces. With the advent of Microsoft Domination we witnesed horrible UIs that were exremely inconsistent. They can't even make their own apps have the same UI as their OS.
- Does the web browser perform as fast as the other ones that are currently in use? (IE, Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera) and can it render the majority of pages that Konqueror can?
These are just some things that people notice.These shots of QNX make is seem like they've missed out all the bad features of other OS's and included all the good ones. I like it.
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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.
Here is a banner example that sometimes rewriting software does make sense. Since 1985, QNX has rewitten thier OS three times, first QNX 2.x, then QNX 4.x and now RTP 6.x. All rewritten from scratch and all better than the last.
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?
Its a real time operating system for embedded devices. The PC based platform is for development to help you rather than plugging directly into the RS232 port of your dev kit.
The questions you ask are nothing to do with an RTOS but looking at it from the perspective of "Oh look a Windows competitor" this is NOT in the same market as even WindowsCE, although there is some overlap. The PC based platform is to aid development, it can be stripped down to a delivery box but this is not for Joe Sixpack PC user.
The real question is "Can anything else run in a couple of Megs of RAM..... or less" and have guarenteed delivery times on tasks. The answer for Linux and MS-Windows is NOPE.
THIS IS NOT A DESKTOP OS.
Sorry for shouting but people should
a) Read the article
b) Understand that MS-Windows and bloatware are not the most interesting market in the world.
c) Realise that cut and paste on a VCR is a silly idea.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The original QNX OS was released as QNX2 in the early 1980s. I don't know the story on QNX 1 - perhaps it was the specialized product that inspired them to attempt a general purpose realtime OS. In the late 1980s/early 1990s it was rewritten as QNX4 to implement many new ideas (and improve on old ideas). This was labelled QNX4. QNX4 gave the world a better, more UNIX-like development platform and more UNIX-like behaviour via POSIX. Not long after QNX4 came Neutrino. This was to be a specialized kernel for deeply embedded applications while QNX4 was to be more general-purpose realtime. The entire QNX4 application base has now evolved to run on Neutrino, so now this is all packaged together like QNX4 was and is called QNX6 or RealTime Platform.
Steve
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.
I guess this is a peek at what the new Amiga could have been. It doesn't look as nice as 3.9, though the underlying technology is pretty neat.
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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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!
"However, I somewhat got the feeling from the new version that QSSL is moving even more far away from a "desktop QNX." " QNX as a company has no interest in the desktop market and all that it entails. (eg. tech. support, updates, etc.) It is mainly concerned with providing a realtime system for industry as well as providing a decent developement environment for the software that will go into those systems.
Eye, says I.
This time is not the time between context switches. It is the time required to perform one context switch.
Windows performs 50 switches per second, but appears to take on the order of 200us to perform a single context switch. That means that windows spends about 10 ms in context switches.
QNX would spend 25us in context switches. This means that it can do a lot more, say a 1000, thats only 1.25ms spent in switches, and a much smoother communitcation between threads.
I haven't seen this OS before, but I wasn't surprised to see it had a primarily Windows 9x-style GUI. Shouldn't we be up to something new? (Even XP, which I sorta like, uses the same old Start button motif).
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!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Maybe I'll make the move from linux to an OS with even LESS supported software. :)
I have no authority on the matter, but it looks like a pretty cool OS.
At one time QNX's realtime features worked in favor of its use on the desktop. That was 20 years ago, when processors were wimpy, and attempts to create GUIs based on DOS had pathetic results.
Of course, QNX's window of opportunity to compete with NT, or even Linux, has long since closed, So the development efforts and the marketing noise emphasize embedded and realtime apps. That's why the Photon GUI is so dated, and the interactive apps are starting to clash with the desktop apps. These are things that could be fixed, but never will be. The reasons are economic, not technical
The beauty of QNX and RtP is the microkernel design (let the flamewars begin). The OS is exteremly resilient because the core kernel just acts as a messaging bus for all other services that run in the user space. For example, should your filesystem crash you can just restart it like any other user space process!. Alternatively if you don't need multitasking capabilities but memory and hardware are at premium you simply don't run proc and don't have to put up with the overhead of a process scheduler. QNX is such a clean design it puts other microkernels to shame. Rock on QSSL.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Could you imagine the uproar if Microsoft tried to charge a license fee before you could release an application that ran on the operating system?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I think you might find RTP would run reasonably well but don't take my word for it. Go to http://qnx.tucows.com/preview/201252.html to download an iso for burning to a CD. If you insert this into the cd drive on an windows box, it will let you make a boot floppy for boxes that won't boot to the CD. Good luck. BTW, you may want to turn of some of the eye candy on the gui (the pointer cam sucks back a few cycles that you can't spare) but I think it might not be too bad.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
from what I've seen, QNX is one of the more friendly embedded systems.
Ever used VxWorks?
No.
It wouldn't be too hard on UNIX. It would require that X run as setuid root, but X could manually renice applications on the fly. Actually, the last point you mention would be very helpful for GUI applications. Tannebaum mentions something similar in relation to lottery scheduling in his book "Modern Operating Systems."
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...