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:First Impressions

[ergo98]

You can always get Opera if you want.

Hello Point... you've missed it.

[MosesJones]

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.

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.

Re:Who is this reviewer?

[dhuff]

"He" is a she - Eugenia Loli-Queru. Eugenia is Editor-in-Chief of OSNews.com. Before moving to the U.S. she was a web-designer in the U.K., ported more than 80 Linux/Posix/DOS applications to BeOS and founded the BeUnited BeOS Development Movement in April 2000.

As for a background in embedded systems, I'm not sure - but she is certainly more qualified than you suggest, having experience with many OSes incl. BeOS, AtheOS and FreeBSD among others...

Amiga

[Snowfox]

A reminder that this was originally going to be the OS used for the new Amiga hardware, before Amiga up and went in a strange, new direction which didn't involve new hardware.

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.

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.

Internet Appliance != Desktop

[MosesJones]

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.

Desktop QNX

[fm6]

THIS IS NOT A DESKTOP OS.

Actually, that's not true. QNX has always had a lot of desktop features, and was originally sold to that market.

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

I'm in love with RtP

[MSBob]

I played with RtP for quite a while. I love it. I learned so much about OS design just by reading the RtP manuals and I think it has a hell of a potential especially on internet appliances and web tablets etc.

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.