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QNX: When an OS Really, Really Has to Work
An anonymous reader writes "Fortune has this article about how QNX's OS has found a niche and is doing well. Especially after 1996 when Microsoft executives said they would crush them in 2 years. When your software absolutely positively needs to work!"
Wow. Do they still have the web-browser-on-a-bootfloppy offer?
This was written in March! dtdodge: is the marketing budget now dedicated to resubmitting old articles to Slashdot? Quick: someone post a link to the Byte story from 1994!
shouldn't all OS design have at least the "intent" of working like this?
not knowing anything about QNX, it sounds like they're just a better OS.
have I missed something?
Especially after 1996 when Microsoft executives said they would crush them in 2 year
can a company said that regarding a competitor?
We are running QNX 6.1 Patch B on PowerPC's with a custom BSP.
We have ported QNX to two custom boards, one based on the MPC7410 PPC and another based on the MPC755. The MPC7410 system is running fine. The new port to the MPC755 has a nasty problem. Anytime spawn() is invoked, the entire QNX system hangs. All processes stop, regardless of priority. This system hang doesn't happen on the MPC7410.
It looks like it's just spawn() that is the problem. We can start and kill large processes from the ksh shell just fine.
This problem does not happen on our MPC7410 system. Other than this spawn problem, both systems run great.
Both systems have MPC107 controllers, 128 MB of SDRAM, and the same Ethernet controller. The MPC7410 system has 2 MB of external L2 cache, the MPC755 system has 1 MB of external L2. We believe that memory and cache integrity are OK.
What could spawn() be doing to take down the whole kernel on the MPC755?
Here is a simple example program that runs fine on the MPC7410, but completely hangs QNX on the MPC755:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <spawn.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
char* path ="/bin/ls";
printf("About to spawn %s\n", path);
fflush(stdout);
spawn(path, 0, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL);
printf("Spawn is done\n");
return 0;
}
Here are the PPC registers on the MPC755 board seen by typical applications:
MSR = 0000.9932
HID0 = 0010.C0A4
HID1 = 8000.0000
L2CR = BB00.0060
We've submitted a request to QNX support for help on this. However, if anyone has any thoughts regarding this problem then please share.
Thanks
I work for a company that spent three years developing a solution using QNX. We found QNX to be unstable (we had it crash countless times), ill-supported (their support personnel are expensive and often not very knowledgable), and to generally have no redeeming qualities. We are now moving to a Linux solution instead.
Newer version of QNX borrow *heavily* from the GNU system software anyway, so all you're doing is swapping out Linux for a "micro" kernel (we were forced to use 64MB Pentiums for our target platforms -- not very micro).
The licensing costs kill your bottom line too. QNX is VERY expensive.
I think it does have a niche, a very small one where people have started using it, released a product and can't easily abandon it.
Ironically, our contracted QNX expert is now doing Linux work since he can't find anyone who wants to use QNX.
I know people use this Operating System and have good success, I'm just not sure why or how. Linux is probably a better choice. Period.
I am currently working on a software development project migrating code _away_ from QNX to Linux. Every time I have to work on the old QNX project I want to bang my head against the monitor.
From what I have seen there is nothing that QNX does that Linux can't do that would justify the license cost.
Neutrino being the QNX-based PC OS.
/. is the unstoppable force, will this cause the universe to end?
This should prove to be interesting in several ways:
1) hands on experience with an "never-crash" OS
2) if QNX is the inmmoveable object, and
p.s. specialized OS don't crash because it's exactly that - specialized. I think windows crash so much because (part of the reason) it runs on so many kinds of hardware, for one. As much as I will get flamed, in OEM applications, like, say, most of the new fancy I-will-never-be-able-to-affort oscilloscopes and the likes, windows usually don't crash.
software and hardware goes together - you can't ALWAYS blame on the software; i am not saying MS writes good code, it's just that I don't think is 100% their fault.
maybe 98%...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
It isn't the operating system controlling the grinding of lenses or correcting the tilt of the TGV. It is a function of the hardware to do these things. That they report back to some software (which could frankly be run on any embedded OS) which then tells them what to do next is almost irrelevant.
Ummm...it is the operating system that matters -- the O.S. is the software that controls the hardware. Just like software on a PC can make the hardware do things it ought not do, software can make a precision laser be off by 1/100 of a millimeter, destroying someone's retina in the process.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
QNX is designed like a modern os should be. It's straigt out of an Operating Systems 101 textbook.
If only Linux had more of QNX's design niceties and robustness.
Too bad the Amiga/QNX desktop thing never became a big hit.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Just picture Bill Gates with a fro, runnning amok on the street of Canada fully armed with thumb and index finger yelling: "I will crush your little precocious head!"
From the article:
Isn't the Windows NT kernel supposed to be a microkernel? Admittedly, it is a bit larger than people intended when they came up with the idea of a microkernel (especially since MS added GUI code to it in NT 4.0), but still...
And what about OS X? That has Mach at its heart doesn't it? That's a microkernel too.
Both of the above are commercially successful.
Moral: Take all non-technical tech writing with a large grain of NaCl
That said, QNX is a solid OS.
sorry for being a dork and replying to myself, but look here for Neutrino. right side of the page.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
WinCE a good embedded system? Hmm.. Isn't that the WinCE that is at the heart of PocketPC? The embedded OS that brought blue screens of death (well, ok, depending on your color scheme a light khaki screen of death) to PDAs? Yeah. I trust WinCE to run my heart monitor if I ever end up in an Intensive Care Unit... *cough*
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Okay, I can forgive all the other typical non-tech-savvy errors, but what's this about QNX being the only commercial microkernel OS?
What's Mac OS X, chopped liver?
In case you didn't understand what ObviousGuy meant by "Operating System" or "OS", I quoth the article:
:)
Like Windows or Linux, QNX's program is an operating system, the traffic cop that organizes and runs a computer's many functions.
Fortune Magazine really coming through with the analogies for those PHBs.
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Kyu-nicks? or Kyu-Enn-Eks?
hoser: Slashdot reader since 1987.
There's nothing software can do to fix a hardware problem. If the laser is not built to be precise to within 1/100th of a millimeter, there's nothing software can do to fix that. The best software can do is send correct coordinates/settings to the hardware and hope that the hardware works correctly.
As for your assertion that the OS is the software that controls the hardware, that is really a gross generalization of an embedded system. If we assume that an embedded OS works correctly (and it is safe to assume this Windows bashing notwithstanding), then the software that matters is not found in the OS (as such) but in the software that runs atop it.
ooh, i want to run qnx on my desktop now :P
You can download a bootable CD from QNX.com that runs "Live", from the CD, so you kick the wheels, so to speak. You can then install it, if you wish.
The QNX floppy demo was for QNX4, while the CD is QNX 6, a vastly improved OS. The floppy can still be found but its not half the OS that QNX 6 is.
QNX is POSIX compliant and can run all Unix utilities, Besides the Photon GUI, you can run various window managers. You can run X Windows apps seemlessly rootless using XPhoton. Already Gimp, AbiWord and others have been ported. There are many native apps as well, irc clients, a mozilla and opera port. Worth a try, at least!
QNX isn't the easiest OS to use (try getting a USB printer to work and you'll find a new definition of pain and suffering) but it is rock solid and fun to geek with.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I have used QNX and I can tell you it is great for embedded systems - it is like an affordable VxWorks - a real time OS with lots of bells and whistles and super stability. However like VxWorks it does lack a lot of hardware support - but you can write your own drivers (of course). You use to be able to download the OS for free for evaluation in a single executable that runs kind of like Knoppix - no real install necessary. Its a cool way to kill an afternoon if your bored (and a geek).
This is an embedded system that is for things like manufacturing. Which means the code for the applications still has to be error free for it to do what is needed. same with regards to efforts to put the system into cars.
I kind of feel the article is misleading, making some beleive just because a system is running QNX that nothing can go wrong.
Well this is somewhat of a generalization. Yes some errors can cause the whole system to crash in both Linux, Windows, and Unix. The difference is that it the way Unix and Linux are designed, it is far less likely.
All the components of their OS were isolated from the microkernel and from one another in their own protected memory spaces.
Protected memory space for the kernel or microkernel: Even Windows has that. The only problem is that "protected" is a very loose tem for Windows. Unlike Windows, Unix and Linux doesn't allow any ordinary application to write to the kernel.
Other than that, QNX does have some potential, but their market is really a niche. Since it is a niche, it doesn't offer the interoperability that other OS offers.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Anyway I took 2 programming courses in basic and pascal. The labs used some strange Unisys dumb terminals connected to a builky black looking box. Very XT-ish and looked like it was from the early to mid 80's. Anyway it ran a no name OS called QNX. I believe it was powered by a 286 or 6800 with about 4 megs of ram for all 20 students. It had no display but a teletype printer where we would print out our programs. It handled quite well for such a limited server.
Its Very old and I remember a 1984 copyright that showed up whenever I booted. I had no idea it was a unixlike system.
It seemed just as fast as a standalone 286 and it had a "$" as the prompt sign with a strange scripting system. I considered it underpowered and old but was supprised by the included gcc, sed, gmake, and other utilities and powerfull scripting. It had some nice api's for 2d graphics displays.
Anyway 2 years later I wanted to try Unix after playing with NT 4 when after it just came out. I tried Caldera (shudder )Linux and I was supprised that I have been running gnu and unix all long. The shell scripts and everything were identical and I have been using Unix without even knowing it.
Linux felt quite old without X in the old days( before kde was stable and gnome was around). But I have qnx running on that horribly ancient system to thank.
http://saveie6.com/
Is it really safe to assume this for real-time control applications?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
'Good enough' for many embedded systems means:
1. the OS is Really Real Time
2. the OS doesn't crash.
WinCE fails on both counts, Linux on at least the 1st, I don't know about VxWorks, but...
They couldn't possibly have reliable code without stealing from Unix. I mean look at the only operating system that hasn't ->Windows. It runs like crap. And don't say that BSD never stole from Unix. AT&T just had crappy lawyers. They should have won that case. IBM and Linux are going down and QNX will soon follow. As soon as SCO wins the IBM case they will go after QNX. The discontent of many companies will then follow. IP thieves will pay!!!
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
*watches as everyone rushes to the site and downloads the free version, like moths to a flame
It of course depends on your definition of "real time". And in the end everyone and their mother's got a hard real-time kernel for their OS of choice, even WinCE (though the name of the 3rd party that offers this extension slips my mind at the moment).
I have been pwned because my
Should have linked here.
Interesting? What type of fuck not are you?
QNX is an OS, yes. But it fills a very small niche where it works very well. I've used it in a college course "real-time programming". Hint....
If you absolutely need control over how a process will run [e.g. timing] QNX beats linux and windows handsdown.
QNX [neutrino] is also VERY small. A fully functioning kernel + drivers + Networking + terminal + etc can run you less than 1MB.
So moderators: how about you RTFA before modding people?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
p.s. specialized OS don't crash because it's exactly that - specialized. I think windows crash so much because (part of the reason) it runs on so many kinds of hardware, for one. As much as I will get flamed, in OEM applications, like, say, most of the new fancy I-will-never-be-able-to-affort oscilloscopes and the likes, windows usually don't crash.
The purpose of an operating system is to provide an abstraction layer between the hardware and application software, and between all of the tasks running on a machine. If done right, this prevents most crashing no matter what you're doing (as most software doesn't have the privileges needed to take down the whole system). If done wrong, application software can muck with things it shouldn't, and the whole system comes crashing down when something goes wrong.
Any of the 9x series of Windows, and WinME, fall into the second category. Windows NT (including 2K and XP), and various Unix flavours and clones (including MacOS X), fall into the first category.
While a general-purpose system has more potential points of failure in software - as you're running more software - this is not an excuse for it to be crash prone. A well-protected OS is vulnerable to bugs in the OS core and in the drivers interfacing with hardware, which will for the most part still be there even in a single-purpose system.
In summary, you can't blame windows crashing on it being a general-purpose operating system. There are plenty of general-purpose OSs that crash far less. There are special-purpose OSs that are designed shoddily, as well (it's just easier to catch that before it goes to market, because the test space is smaller).
FWIW, re. another thread, my understanding is that WinCE is a stepchild of NT (heavy rewrite to make it modular and to pare out functionality that isn't needed in embedded systems, while keeping most of the core OS design). That should make its behavior similar to that of NT.
QNX has been the only company so far to commercialize a microkernel OS.
I love QNX, but they definitely aren't the only company to commercialize a microkernel OS. Apple, while late in the game, are shipping some big numbers. Of course, don't forget NeXT before them, or for you penguin-heads, MkLinux.
I read Slashdot using QNX, on an Audrey. I almost bought another one at a garage sale today for $20, but it had no power supply. Plus the keyboard was Lime.
From the article: "QNX has been the only company so far to commercialize a microkernel OS."
Am I just ignant, or isn't Mac OS X built on top of the Mach microkernel, with a monolithic 4.4BSD kernel atop it?
You don't even have to spell things correctly. There should be a "google prerequisite" for posting a question to slashdot.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi omnem pecuniam tuam mihi dabis, ad tuum caput saxum immane mittam.
Are they good employers? What's their dental plan like? The last outfit which employed me didn't have one, so naturally my wisdom teeth needed pulling, and it cost me a fortune. I bet Bill and Steve have really great teeth...
you don't know much about ROTS's do you lol ?? ..... btw for your info ..... its non-trivial to design such a reliable OS ..... till now we do not have any step by step scientific method for the model verification ... yes there are tools to judge the deadlocks/livelocks/race conditions/etc ... but the entire process of designing is not totally laid down ......
:)) ROFL ... your basis of reasoning about the h/w support for microsoft being more is silly ....... do you think that one would be so insane that he would even start designing an OS for a life support system without getting 110% support from the OEMs ??
....
>> In that situation it is WinCE that comes out ahead of the pack
PLEEEASE don't compare WinCE to QNX
next time please do not post just for the sake of it
I sure as hell wouldn't want to have my eyes operated on by a WinCE or even a Linux system. They are not stable enough. That's one of those situations when 99.9% isn't good enough.
If you haven't taken the challenge yet, it's pretty cool. You can get it here too.
Dan Hildebrand was one of the early luminaries of QNX in Kanata, just outside of Ottawa. Although I only met him once, I knew him well via the local Fidonet and Unix communities. It's too bad he isn't around to enjoy this story. But I am sure he is smiling about it wherever he is! Slashdot story about his death It's hard to believe it's been 5 years.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
That they report back to some software (which could frankly be run on any embedded OS) which then tells them what to do next is almost irrelevant.
What is not irrelevant is that the OS is ready, willing, and able to tell them what to do next, no matter what else is going on.
Drive a mountain road at high speeds. Make most of the curves.
I'm trying not to comment on this, but as two people modded it "interesting," obviously this fallacy needs to be shot down. While true for PDA's, which is obviously what ObviousGuy has experience with, it is not at all true for many real embedded systems.
QNX is for those times when "Good enough" isn't good enough. An associate of mine used to run the network for a major medical responce company. They used to count downtime in the number of people dead due directly to the lack of a network. If you accidentally pulled a plug on the way to lunch, 4 people would be dead because of you.
Their uptime target was 24-7-365-20. There was no such thing as "Good Enough."
Ideally, any OS should do. It should be a flawlessly written middleman layer between flawlessly written hardware and flawlessly written software. But we all know that software is flawed, hardware drivers are flawed, and OS's are flawed. When WinCE comes across a problem in the kernel, it panics and comes crashing down. When Linux comes across a problem in the kernel, it panics and comes down. According to this article, when QNX comes across a problem in the kernel, it cuts off, shuts down, and reboots just the offending section, cutting downtime from 30 seconds to microseconds. That's pretty darned cool.
Sure, the foundation of your house is just the interface between the ground and your software creation. But if your foundation is bad, no matter how much support the system integrator can provide, your house won't stay up for long. If you're building apartments, that might not matter. If you're building a hospital, your negligence could cost lives.
And by the way, it's the software that controls the grinding of the lens. If the hardware knew how to grind a lens already, it wouldn't have electronics. The software controls the OS, the OS controls the hardware. Your Software->OS->Hardware diagram should have proven to you how important it is to have a reliable OS in the middle.
The ______ Agenda
I'm pretty sure AOL, RealPlayer, and Bonzi Buddy will find a way to crash QNX.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
the mozilla port is on the qnx site; do you have links to the abiword, gimp, etc ports? also, do you know if any of the horde of chat clients have been ported?
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
I give it a six-and-a-half overall. It *sounds* like you know what you're talking about to anyone just skimming the comments, that's good. Relevence to the topic is spot-on. You spell and punctuate too well to be a regular slashdotter, but that takes a careful reader to notice anyway. You lose a few marks for abuse of "scare quotes", but that's no big deal. The signature is what keeps you from trolling with the big boys though; it blows your apparent credibility right out the window. Nice try though.
0 1 - just my two bits
That is a ridiculous statement.
Any software/hardware device that is going to be used in the medical field is going to undergo many hours of intensive stress testing, whether it is running WinCE, Linux, QNX, VxWorks, iTron, or a homegrown solution.
No OS can be trusted implicitly, nor can hardware be trusted completely. However, at some point the definition of "good enough" must be decided and testing done to ensure that "good enough" level of availability.
You want to implicitly distrust a medical device running WinCE or Linux, but it is simply a gut reaction and not based on anything more than that. A device in the wild running WinCE or Linux has had to undergo and pass the same level of testing as a device running another OS to be admitted into medical usage. They are for all intents and purposes equivalent, with the same possibility for failure.
I have been pwned because my
AIX, nuff said.
The OS X kernel is, as I understand it, has both mach part and bsd part, and they both have access to the same memory, for the sake of speed of system calls, so it's not a microkernel, it just incorporates technology from a microkernel project. Unless i'm wrong, in which case I'm sure i'll here about it.
A device in the wild running WinCE or Linux has had to undergo and pass the same level of testing as a device running another OS to be admitted into medical usage.
That's why LASIK systems don't run on WinCE.
The ______ Agenda
ah, but you're missing several points of the embedded system design.
the layered microkernel system is there to make sure the os never crashes. how does it do this better than wince or linux? well, since the drivers are out of "kernel space", even if one crashes, it will not bring down the whole os. in linux, if you yank out [device of your choice] while the system is using it, you may very well get a kernel panic. in qnx, the driver crashes, and the os moves on (maybe reloades it, maybe sends a warning to someone).
the second part that you're missing is that in many super-tight embedded systems, the driver IS the application. obviously this is not true for your palm or digital camera, but for software in a pacemaker or in a car brake management system, there is no "app".
and finally, if you've ever seen linux crash or wince bluescreen, for whatever reason, consider that in some places, that is just *not acceptable*. that is the difference, and that is why qnx and vxworks and psos and friends exist.
So what was this about? QNX is good, it's debugged and is trusted in mission-critical applications (contrary to other code that still has been used in e.g. cars and almost choked important government people inside BMW's).
/. crowd that _should_ know that QNX is _way_ better and more trustworthy for those embedded missions you have.
/. editor thinks all /. readers are...
I still fail to see how this could matter to the
Perhaps I'm just dumb... or the
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(and this after you fill out the survey
-can someone post an ISO bittorrent
-888 Geek Help (888-433-5435)
So I guess you're not doing any hard real-time, what were you using QnX for anyways?
Their uptime target was 24-7-365-20. There was no such thing as "Good Enough."
So their "Good Enough" level was 1 system crash every 20 years without a reboot.
Why is it difficult for you to understand the concept of Good Enough?
This is why WinCE and Linux are Good Enough as well. Once you define what Good Enough is for your device, you can choose which OS provides you with the best solution.
A project worthy of any Robot finds kitten fan, QNX for the Dreamcast.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Wince for Windows CE. How appropriate.
And thanks to the program's "self-healing" feature, a dead player is automatically replaced or resurrected in millionths of a second without affecting the rest of the band. QNX has been the only company so far to commercialize a microkernel OS.
1. Isn't OS X a microkernel OS that has been commercialised?
2. Wouldn't it be marvellous is OS X gained this `self- healing' feature?
From Fortune :
As a delighted user has put it, "The only way to make this software malfunction is to fire a bullet into the computer running it."
Didn't Tandem actually run an ad claiming that if you shot a bullet into their servers they would keep running?
Sure, I trust testing. After all, if an OS seems to work right most of the time, it's fine. If my copy of mozilla doesn't crash within an hour, it will never crash. Since the Therac-25 underwent stringent testing, it was perfectly safe, right?
BZZZZZT! Wrong answer. Evidence shows that testing cannot be trusted to reveal all defects. No matter how much you test a system, there is still a very significant risk that it will contain a defect. That's why practically all critical systems use a PROCESS to prevent errors from getting in. That's why the military forces Ada for all systems, why off-the-shelf components aren't used for life-support systems, and why MIL specs are not just based on reliability tests. Since neither Linux nor WinCE underwent any type of certification, code audit, or specialized quality-control processes, they cannot be trusted despite what tests might indicate.
Just miss the vital parts!
They come on the third part CD which you download seperately or download from QNX in the second part of the install.
As for chat, there is Gaim, naim, killerIRC, X Chat, phIRC, to name a few. There is jabber client whose name eludes me. Voyager is a web browser, there is Opera and killerWeb which is a front to many engines, including opera, voyager and mozilla (each of which can be run in a seprate tab!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
You might like this. Old cartoon I saw in some scifi mag like analog or someting. Guy on a train, standing up, holding the overhead strap. He looks around 6 feet, 13 and 1/2 inches tall, around 400 lbs, in a suit, and he's holding a briefcase.
caption --> "conan the commuter"
I'm thankfull I haven't seen any CNC lathes or mills yet which run on WinCE. I think I'd laugh at the workshop administrator if he ever bought one. On second thought, I think he'd laugh at me if I suggested it :)
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
There is defiantly a value in the niche markets. Unfortunately people/companies/communities like Microsoft and Linux are targeting the be the best general purpose OS, And when people get an OS they always try to find the best General Purpose OS. Even if they are using the OS for 1 or 2 jobs. The smart thing to do is to find OS's that actually specialize in the jobs that need to be done. Designing General purpose software comes with a lot of tradeoffs in its design, so you are getting a best OK system for the job. While if you actually find the OS that handle the niche job. You will often find that they come with a lot less tradeoffs or better focused tradeoffs in its design, is works a lot better for the job it is intended.
Comparing Microsoft v. Linux Is like comparing a Swiss Army Knife with a Leatherman. But systems like QNX and other niche OS's are more like a Hammer and Screwdriver. Although they don't have as much functionality as the Swiss Army Knife. They do their job better and are more reliable for their jobs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Thanks, mate. I've been looking for that for ages.
The US Navy has used a CD-ROM tech library called ATIS for years. It is based on a Kubik 240 CD-ROM changer with an external controller called a Mediator. The mediator runs QNX. I worked on some ATIS systems and found the CD-ROM changer to be an extremely fragile and unreliable electromechanical beast, but NEVER saw a failure, glitch, or error on the QNX based mediator. This was a tribute to the hardware it ran on as much as well as the OS. Interestingly enough, I am intimately familiar with the inside of the Kubik changer, but have no idea what CPU, memory, or disk the Mediator ran on. This was simply because the changer was always broke and the Mediator never had to be touched from the day it was installed.
People in white lab coats are the primary cause of cancer in rats.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
In the mid-80's I frequented a multi-user BBS which ran on Qnx. The machine? A 4.77 MHz 8088 IBM PC clone. It had 10 or 12 lines each running a 300 baud modem. It had email, newsgroups, chat, games, and downloads. I had a developer account and could compile C programs. All while the system was full. Without anyone even noticing. The OS is smooth as silk.
Later, the BBS was upgraded to an 8 MHz AT clone and 2400 baud modems. Still, smooth as silk, even at capacity.
The BBS never crashed once and always ran smooth.
I can't say much about today's Qnx, because I haven't used it. But yesterday's Qnx displayed a level of quality I've never seen in another OS. If I ever find myself needing medical attention, I usre as hell hope the OS running under the hood is Qnx. There is nothing more reliable.
-Teckla
You better seen who your local hospital is buying their EKG monitors from then (Siemens, HP or Philips). The Phillips portable telemetry monitors ARE running WinCE! I had one that refused to synch with the patients side of the telemetry unit while a patients was having PACs. We punted and grabbed a portable defib and just used it as a monitor while we verted her chemically.
Still, which would you trust with your "gut", a stripped OS to operate on you or an OS built from ground up to never fail?
Sure, you can take a huge luxury SUV and strip it into a go cart(sp?) (somehow), but it makes more sense to build a go cart from the ground up to be a go cart.
Question everything.
Read the whole thread, no bit torrent link yet from anyone. I thought that was the gnu rools and stuff here with OS ISOs.
With that said,(to anyone) how out of the box secure is this thing? I admit I had never even heard of it before. I am just wondering, I have some old pentiums kicking around to play with.
Nice ad. Maybe use a banner next time?
Only partly true.
The operating system provides the framework within which the software works. For things like a desktop where things like the occasional 1/2 second ~ 3second delay isn't fatal, and blue-screening a couple of times a week (or day, as the case may be) is mostly just an annoyance, then yes -- the two are pretty much equal.
For things like nuclear reactor control, precision robotics and medical instruments, where a 1 miliseond (much less 1 second) hickup can result in death and destruction. they are most definitely not equal. The hard realtime in Windows is, well, not that hard. It's pretty easy to get Windows to lock up for the better part of a second. Linus is only slightly better -- but only when you install the realtime patches.
As far as reliability, Microsoft is still proud of being able to (sometimes) run for 3 months at a shot without rebooting. Linux has a much better history, but it's still far from bulletproof. As far as I know, neither one is certified to run things like nuclear reactors and medical equipment.
The Navy's decicision to use Windows to run their battleships has been the source of some amusement -- having managed to bluescreen one ship and leaving it 'dead in the water'. As to whether this could happen during a battle, converting 'dead in the water' to 'dead and in the water' is a matter of conjecture. All I can say with certainty is that I'm glad I'm not a US sailor.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
You think that Good Enough is some sort of objective standard. It isn't. You think that WinCE is not Good Enough because it isn't real time. Disregarding that it is real time to within 500 microseconds (I believe, I'm sure this info is available), WinCE is just fine for a whole slew of embedded devices. For those things it is definitely Good Enough.
If you want to argue about the real-timeness of WinCE, you're going to have to find another thread. This one is about Good Enoughness, and every person so far has made the same error. This isn't about Linux or WinCE's abilities to run strike fighter targetting systems, it's about the vast majority of other embedded systems none of which require the same level of availability or real-timeness as other embedded systems.
To reiterate my original post. First you decide what your requirements for Good Enough are, then you choose the OS that provides you with that level of support. What can you possibly argue with there?
I work for a robotics company. We use QNX as the OS on our PC based control. The following is an example of how QNX has impressed me.
One November a customer called and complained that they were not getting their log files. These log files were written to a ftp shared directory. One of my coworkers logged into the robot via modem and started looking around. When he tried to get a directory listing he got an Input/Output error instead. After a little digging around in the logs in ram he determined the hard drive had died. The most interesting thjing is that the hard drive had apparently died in August. The robot had run continually from August to November and the only trace of any problems was the lack of log files. There was no other permament storage in the system. The OS, UI and all the robot applications were running in RAM for 3 months without problems.
I Love QNX
I Don't Work Here
Truly geeky, by Crom!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The qnx.com website seems to be max'ed out for dowloads. little help anyone?
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
I remember the I-Opener network appliance device ran QNX. It didn't take long for someone to hack into the little PC running a Cyrix chip and turn it into a usable Linux/Windows PC. That was fun and I am still using it to date right on my end table in the living room.
Just imagine a Beowolf cluster of these.
Doh! Wait! QNX doesn't do that.
Never mind.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
! Garbage collection interrupt
! Garbage collection complete
* Now where was I...
I'm not saying WinCE couldn't do it, mostly, but Microsoft usually hangs too much stuff in the OS for me to trust it. (There's a reason for that "not to be used in medical uses" legal weasel disclaimer on lots of software.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Isn't that the OS they use to run the nuclear subs for the US navy?
Good thing the FAA uses QNX, cause if they ran MS software, it would go something like this:
Air Traffic Boss: How's it going?
Air Traffic Controller: Fine.
Boss: What's That? (Points to blue screen)
Controller: Oh, that happens when we try to track more than three planes.
Boss: Why does it do that?
Controller: We only purchased a 3-plane license. If we try to track 4, Palladium kicks in, and the whole thing locks up.
Boss: Doesn't that sound, you know, dangerous?
Controller: Not as dangerous as this! (plays an illegal mp3, sirens blow, and all machines are shut down, power is cut off, forcing runway lights to turn off, while planes crash like crazy.)
Pic here
A hacker favorite! This little e-mail/web browser station ran QNX out of the box.
-ted
If you absolutely need control over how a process will run [e.g. timing] QNX beats linux
and windows handsdown.
For what its worth, DOS beats Linux and Windows hands down too.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
For damages .NET offers you what you paid or $5, which ever is greater. Whee! (Great Microsoft's yelling set off the lameness filter. *sigh*, I am not going to fix it for them. Hopefully if I type a little more, it'll get past, otherwise you'll never see this. Nope, this is indeed a disapointment. This makes me very angry, very angry indeed!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It is important that whatever approach you take -- if you want it to succeed in the long run -- should attract developers to your idea and keep them there. Obviously, micro-kernel's haven't done that. Irrelevant of their *theoretical* advantages if done just right. Who cares if they might be more efficient or faster theoretically if they don't attract any developers and take forever to evolve? Monolithic kernels, despite their theoretical inferiority, will be faster and more efficient because more developers will be working on them, and will be able to resolve inefficiencies faster.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Interestingly, one of the QNX founders is named Gordon Bell, which is coincidentally the name of a very famous system architect at Digital and later at Microsoft Research. Finally this article gave enough information I was able to convince myself that it was just a name space collision, they aren't the same fellow.
Primitive species of the homo genus were specialists. One of them was a specialist in eating the toughest of tough leaves and other vegetation. Specialists are unchallenged and supreme in their area. We -- homo sapiens -- suck at eating tough vegetation compared to earlier relatives, which went extinct ages ago.
Specialists, however, lack the ability to efficiently evolve, change, and adapt.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
My ass they dont crash. There are plenty of placed embeded Windows crash's. The latest: Parking ticket machines around Houston. I had the chance to talk with a tech working on the parking garage machine's. He said they were great before the OS upgrade to Windows.
Crackers
Not really. DOS has no scheduling at all. In fact a poorly implemented IRQ handler can rob CPU time indiscriminatly.
More to the point DOS has no multi-processing abilities, no semaphores, no mutexes, etc...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
is not a real microkernel OS, even if you are using a microkernel.
That's why LASIK systems don't run on WinCE.
You forgot "or Linux."
Didn't Linux help write some of that OS 101 textbook?
I played with QNX 6.0a a while ago (year or two?) I found it to be a great OS, for the most part. My only hangups were having to install and configure SMP manually, and then having to install a USB SDK for my mouse to work. I also had to develop an input trap in order to make the mouse work by default on startup. Other than that it worked great, with one exception.
QNX is a realtime OS, and as such I think it's not quite where a desktop OS needs to be. While it handles multitasking fairly well, when any of those tasks required 100% of either of my CPUs the Photon GUI would screech to a halt. It harkened back to the days of coorperative multitasking in Windows 3.1. So when running programs occaisionally the computer would seem to freeze with no indication of ever relinquishing control. I would always get it back, sometimes after a couple of minutes, but the experience is unnerving.
Well, that's because DOS isn't an operating system in the same sense as Linux or Windows. It would make as much or more sense to write your real-time app as self-booting with no OS at all. That's basically what you get with DOS (well, that and the FAT filesystem).
> You can see the same in ecology: fast growing, non-native plants often
> displace native plants quickly, but in the end, they die because they
> aren't well adapted to the long-term conditions.
Guess I'm not taking a long enough view or something, but I can point out a couple of counter examples. Come down south and behold the Kudzu, been quite a while since it was introduced into the local ecology and it is still kicking the ass off of everything it encounters. Or go to south Louisiana and behold the nutria, a small rodent like animal that has wreaked major havok on the local ecology since it arived and shows no sign of dying off anytime soon.
Democrat delenda est
Or you have tried it as a "normal" desktop type OS? Have any thoughts on it if so?
I noticed on the download page for the hobbyist freebie version they recommend a 400 mhz speed cpu minimum and 128 ram. well, I thought the whole idea of it was small, maybe could run adequately on much older chips and much less ram. It's also a big download, at least on dialup modem. I like the idea of small/fast/uber reliable though, and it says it has a full GUI and whatnot with it. Just wondering if it's really worth it to try, I was really looking for something better able to run on the cast off older computers out there (I fix them up and give them away or sell them cheap/whatever). I've been looking for something adequate but bulletproof I can give brand new & inexperienced users for those sorts of older low powered machines.
It's "fuck-knot". Please be precise.
As an added bonus, the /dev file system is entirely dynamic, showing only the drivers that are running. Thankfully, Linux is going in this direction.
Two areas where QNX falls down are the lack of USB profiles for mass storage and the lack of a journalling file system. The lack of a journalling file system is particularly worrisome, since QNX is often operating in an environment where the power could be pulled at any time.
The key idea behind QNX is that it does interprocess message passing between protected-mode processes really, really well. Everything else is built on top of that. In most other OSs, interprocess communication was an afterthought, and it shows. Typically, message passing is built on top of the I/O system. In QNX, the I/O system is built on top of message passing.
The QNX kernel is very stable because it only does a few basic things, and those few things are heavily exercised and well debugged. New system calls are very rarely added. New features go in new user processes.
Development on QNX is straightforward. The whole GNU command-line toolset is available. The API is Posix-compatible. The QNX calls are well integrated with the Posix calls; there aren't separate "Posix threads", like some other OSs.
QNX is the last OS vendor that competes commercially with Microsoft on x86 desktop machines. The fact that they're still alive says something.
You can run QNX as a desktop OS, and I have a machine on my desk that does so. But there's not much desktop-type software. Mozila, AbiWord, and Eclipse have been ported, but that's about it for graphical desktop applications. OpenOffice has not been ported, and it would be a huge win if somebody did that.
QNX has its own windowing system, Photon, which is like nothing else out there. It's quite good, and much cleaner than most windowing systems. But it's different.
Hardware support is spotty. Graphics support is mostly for obsolete boards, although anything that supports VGA or VESA modes will work. (NVidia refuses to release enough information to allow development of QNX drivers.) USB 1 is supported, but only for a few peripherals. USB 2 is not, nor is FireWire. (I've been writing FireWire camera support.)
QNX runs our robot vehicle for the DARPA Grand Challenge. It has to work.
Is it? I've always said "fuck-nut", but I actually thought "fuck-not" was a good insult, in its own way.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
In the UK British Telecom uses QNX for the Internet phones in the highstreet.
:o)
There was only one glitch, they left anonymous Ftp open
I've seen a release from Hyperion Entertainment that stated QNX RTOS had context switching times of 40 microsecons. In the same paper, it asid MacOSX was around 400.
The announcement was that AmigaOS4 PPC on a 600Mhz AmigaOne had around 4 microseconds, give or take a few micro. Im not sure how correct my figures were, but AmigaOS turned out a little better...
I wonder if theres room for more playsers in this niche.
Good article.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
QNX is great, no doubt by far one of my favourite OS's but I have crashed it. Although it crashed on my p166, it was probably my machine. The again QNX is more or less made for embedded devices'. The bootdisk was the best tho, you can always count on it when your machine gets fux0red, you always have access to pr0n!!!!!!
Seriously, I design my applications like that.....
On the other hand, maybe we could get ATI to ask them to write drivers....
I've seen a lot of posts in this thread that make the point that QNX isn't really for workstations/PCs etc... it is for when things absolutely, positively must work always.
I grant that this is not a requirement for desktop users, for example, because no one's life is usually at stake if your instant message or e-mail doesn't go through (in fact that might be a blessing considering the content of some of them). And it would be really expensive to require all computer programs to be as robust as QNX appears to be.
But leaving that aside for a second, why shouldn't people expect all computer programs to be that reliable? Why do I have to put up with the annoyance of killing processes or rebooting even if it is just an annoyance? Shouldn't we try to making computing that reliable always? Is it possible?
I guess it might not be for certain kinds of applications since a user could theoretically input or try to process anything, but it seems that the QNX system isn't written to be bulletproof in that way, it is just written with the assumption to trust nothing and recover gracefully from all errors. Should programs just be that way? Or is it improbable to be able to create a 3-D graphics card/word processor/what-have-you with that kind of reliability?
Maybe we can't do this because of the anomaly that will become the One or maybe I should have laid off the peyote before writing this, or maybe I would remember something from my CS degree that reveals I am being stupid but can't because I'm too tired. I'm getting ver-clemped: feel free to discuss amongst yourselves or mod me down.
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
QNX was actually developed by two Waterloo students as their final assignment. It was very very basic but it was soooo good that the they could sell it. And thats just what they did, they worked on it, made it what it is today and are now being mentioned on Fortune.... lucky fucks. ...I'm not jealous, nooo not at all. =P
It will, however, guide a laser over someone's eye for Lasik and other such procedures a thousand times a year without a glitch.
I hate be the bearer of frightning news, but they're using Windows NT and DOS for this in some LASIK systems.
You might want to ask what OS the LASIK machine runs before you have the procedure done to yourself. I certainly would be *very* picky in my choice.
I'm watching "Walking with Cavemen" on Discover channel right now, too!
Think of the OS as one of the structural components in an engineering project, you wouldn't choose failure prone materials even if they were cheaper because that's a false economy at best, and a possible risk to peoples lives at worst.
The computers in a nuclear power plant may well only send signals to say "vent radioactive gas", but if the operating system locks up because of a stray interrupt, or the CPU locks up because someone said F00F, the consequences could be catastrophic.
The Software is crucial, the OS is crucial and the hardware is crucial for any computer system to keep operating as it should. I think that's a fair generalization.
Ever heard the saying that a chain is only as important as it's weakest link?
you watch too much E.R.
You are very fat.
/.'er
Fatty
I know a guy who wrote some cruise missile guidance software for US military. He says they (the military) don't give a crap about software errors. They test their shit in field and if it hits something politically sensitive (like a bus with civilians or a house 50 miles away from the target) - then they will fix the bugs. Proper software engineering is way too expensive even for the military.
Now, we have the article describing QNX as the quintessential "When Software Really, Really Has to Work" OS.
How about Linux ?
Can we say, without lying, that Linux can measure up to QNX on that front ?
If not, when can we expect Linux to gain that status ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I agree with wfberg. The best example would lie the BMW 745i, which has an embedded WindowsCE-based system. This system was so buggy that BMW has already done two recalls...
This is a scary (and funny) example of what has gone wrong with the car:
"Suchart Jaovisidha, Thailand's finance minister, was on his way to address central bank officials from around the world when his state-assigned BMW stalled, the Associated Press reported.
'The engine stopped, the air conditioning shut down, the doors got locked and the windows wouldn't roll down,' Suchart was quoted as saying.
'We couldn't breathe because there was no air,' he added.
To draw attention, the minister and his driver waved frantically at passers-by. The incident ended only after a nearby security guard smashed the car's windows with a sledgehammer.
Even with the heavy-duty tool, Suchart said it took a long time to break the windows as the 'glass proved to be very resistant'. "
qnx.com's download page sucks. first, they only allow very few simutaneous downloads (probably discourage "free" users:), second, if you are lucky and finally get in, you will find they don't support "resume", so you can't use any "download managers" and are out of luck if your link is broken half way though, third, the ISO file is NOT compressed, and it is about 10% fatter than if it were compressed. I would suggest you use one of the mirror sites if you really want to try it out. Read old news and comments at http://www.openqnx.com for many mirrors.
As others have already pointed out, it is made for a variety of platforms including PCs and does support PC hardware such as USB quite well. It doesn't have a Borg mentality behind it, which might explain why it's not on every office desktop, but it's been actively sought out by those who need an OS that doesn't crash regularlly. I know of some mission critical process control applications that are still put up on Win 3.1 or DOS because the programmer made sure the application was rock stable, enough to run 24 hours a day 365 days a year without rebooting, and no newer Microsoft OS will stay up running it. Maybe someday industry will realize how many lost man-centuries are spent just retyping things because Microsoft decided things were good enough for it's customers and left some bugs in (or added some if there were not enough) just to be sure there would be customer demand for the next release to cure the current release's bugs. There is certainly no reason that QNX could not be a viable desktop network, except the monopoly wielding power of the company that has already been convicted of abusing that monopoly in federal court.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
No, we are NOT missing anything !
In fact, I think you are missing a lot !
I am afraid to say that all the above quote is really misguided.
I don't know if your misguiding attempt is genuinely intentional, but boy, you really have no idea what an OS really does, do you?
Give you a hint, OS, no matter if it's MS-Windoze, Mac OS, or AIX, or QNX, or even Linux, none of them does advanced 3D tricks. That's the job of USERSPACE SOFTWARES.
Before you argue with me, please tell us exactly which part of the Linux Kernel does "advance 3D tricks" ?
Actually, comparing Linux with QNX is NOT only NOT SILLY, it should be one of the criteria for those who want to be the Linux Kernel hackers - and let them prove their worth by making Linux as bulletproof as QNX, INside and OUTside of the field of embedded, real-time applications.
Until Linux can achive such a status, don't even think of having Linux run critical applications like you have mentioned - Nuclear Power Plant and such.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Absolutely ignorant article. Linux and Windows have a monolithic kernel yes, but protected memory spaces. QNX is not the only company to market a microkernel OS, try NeXT and then Apple. Mach has been around for ages in many 'commercial' applications. Blah Blah Blah.
Microsoft can and does do anything they damn well please. Much of it is illegal, some the courts have even convicted them of, but they simply reject any punishment that they don't like and instead get punishments like "we will not do it again, wink" or "How about if we have to donate to the next generation of potential customers millions of dollars worth of software that actually costs us nothing to donate, and a few refurb old computers, and take the donation as a big tax write-off, that would be a punishment we would accept". Please don't mod this as funny, it's not at all funny. It's the damn truth.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Anyone here remember the fad with that little network computer? Dunno which version of QNX it had because I installed Linux over it...
That was a fun project while it lasted.
Jw
According to Microsoft sworn testimony, the OS has the browser so tightly intigrated into it that it can't be removed. That's hardly a microkernel.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Pocket PC is based on Windows CE, but it doesn't use the default Windows CE GUI. Palm-sized PCs, based on Windows CE 2.11, used the deault GUI, and everyone thought it was too complicated to use. Then Microsoft re-designed the Pocket PC GUI to make it work more like Palm OS instead of Windows.
"The AK47 - when you absolutely positively have to kill every motherfucker in the room."
>Why would linux kernel hackers be adding tools >like HTTP servers and packet filtering into the >kernel, if it was somehow the UNIX way to keep >them as seperate processes managed by the kernel?
"Hello? Hi, Jim. I'd like you to put everything I have in Microsoft stocks. Just buy at market all day. Oh, and if I'm in any of those little Open Source companies get me the hell out of them. It's just a hunch."
Seriously, they are *not* doing this, are they? I can just picture a whole bunch of 19-year-olds with stuffed penguin toys on their desks going, "Wow, look at the great performance gains we can get just by putting all applications in kernel mode! Take that, Micro$loth!"
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Are you sure about that? Maybe you should find out what a process is and how you schedule one and what happens when an IRQ ocures before you make yourself look silly.
The article states that "QNX has been the only company so far to commercialize a microkernel OS."
Apples OS X is running the Mach microkernel, so this statement is wrong.
-- unix is for people without a social life - Patrick van Eijk
It's quite simple really.
Big kernels have more potential for disaster.
Run everything you can in user space and you reduce your risk.
That's a great theory but in practice you need a great kernel and some suitable userland support.
Don't think HURD, think plan9
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Linus is only slightly better -- but only when you install the realtime patches.
Give the man a break, he's only human. After all, I bet you've found yourself stood in the kitchen wondering why you're there, too!
These real time patches sound interesting though. Are they anything like a Nicotene Patch?
If you're still struggling to get it off the offical site, you can find QNX here:
Planet Mirror.
A couple of different ISOs are offered - one with all the packages, and a basic ISO. It's able to install within a Windows partition, apparently.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
That's hype. In what way is it better than linux, freebsd and solaris (well, actually forget solaris. it's the slowest OS in the UNIX world)?
That it is designed to run in small systems where there will be a maximum of 32 processes?
Thanks a lot! I can write such an OS. An OS with a static array of 16 processes of equal priority.
R0X0R!!
Will I be famous now?
Move along. There's nothing to see here. No big technology breakthrough. Just hype.
Sorry if it is a few months old but I just barely read the article. I am in the military and am currently stuck in Kuwait. Things get here a little slower. Just thought it was a good article.
QNX is the OS that got me into operating systems. Their message passing system was the first real "ah HAH!" I ever had, regarding OS design. The micro-kernel architecture was the second.
.. but my heart belongs to QNX. :)
I love Linux
Small download (fits on a floppy) is Arachne 1.70
-- Yoda
This reminds me of the time when at COMDEX, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon.
In response to Gates' comments, General Motors issued the following press release (by Mr. Welch himself, the GM CEO).
If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
2. Occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason, and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this, restart and drive on.
3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre would cause your car to stop and fail to restart and you'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this too.
4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a "Car 95" or a "Car NT". But then you'd have to buy more seats.
5. Amiga would make a car that was powered by the sun, was twice as reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive - but it would only run on five percent of the roads.
6. Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars which would make their cars go much slower.
7. The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
8. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for many years.
9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft gas and all auto fluids but the packaging would be superb.
10. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
11. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
12. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.
13. They wouldn't build their own engines, but form a cartel with their engine suppliers. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it.
14. There would be an "Engium Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads.
15. Microsoft cars would have a special radio/cassette player which would only be able to listen to Microsoft FM, and play Microsoft Cassettes. Unless of course, you buy the upgrade to use existing stuff.
16. Microsoft would do so well, because even though they don't own any roads, all of the road manufacturers would give away Microsoft cars free, including IBM!
17. If you still ran old versions of car (ie. CarDOS 6.22/CarWIN 3.11), then you would be called old fashioned, but you would be able to drive much faster, and on more roads!
18. If you couldn't afford to buy a new car, then you could just borrow your friends, and then copy it.
19. Whenever you bought a car, you would have to reorganise the ignition for a few days before it worked.
20. You would need to buy an upgrade to run cars on a motorway next to each other.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
About one year ago an other student and I tried the QNX live CD. Neutrino looked quite fine and it was an interesting OS.
But after doing a floodping at the QNX machine it stopped doing anything. I don't know if it crashed but even the window is able to handle these floodpings.
However maybe it got fixed - I'll test it again in the next days.
b4n
Recent studies show something.
I'm smarter than the average bear.
Is that right? Not even on Mac OS X (which uses Mach)?
But systems like QNX and other niche OS's are more like a Hammer and Screwdriver. Although they don't have as much functionality as the Swiss Army Knife. They do their job better and are more reliable for their jobs.
QNX is being used by industry to run a vast array of completely different machines. It's obviously doing more than one job, it just does them one at a time. Software is always flexible, unless it's closed then it's just another chunk you can't modify. According to the article QNX is being used for "general purpose" computing too. Another poster mentioned the Audry as an example.
The other thing that's anoying about your post and the article itself is the compairison of Linux and Microsoft crap as equals because both employ a monolithic kernel. What crap. Stable distros of GNU/Linux don't crash whith anything like the frequency M$ crap does. While M$ execs laugh like madmen over the prospect of running an M$ system for more than 30 days, calling it "insane", Free software routinely runs for months and years on a variety of hardware. NT proves that this instability on M$'s part is a matter of code quality, because it uses a microkernel. It's very irritating for people to assume that free software sucks simply because it can be used as a replacement for software that should not be tollerated.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The point is, that since macro-kernel's are much easier to get into initially and maintain, they will be superior in practice, despite their inferiority in theory. This is because more programmers will be working on making them better. If a theoretically inferior design is much easier to work on and understand in practice, it will be better than a theoretically superior design -- in practice. If you don't get this obvious point, then there's no hope for you.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The US does not have any battleships on active duty. The ship you where talking about was a Aegis class crusier.
Yes the error could have caused it to go from "dead in the water" to "Dead and under water" it it had happened in combat.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Just give Microsoft some time. When have they ever got a project finished by the announced date?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The nature of non-modular things means that they can regress in serious ways (because everything's bunched together). However, the Linux kernel has some pretty significant advantages over the main micro-kernel competitor (BSD's Kernel). It supports more hardware (try getting an HP OfficeJet to work on *BSD). Furthermore, more programs will work with it.
So, if you really feel the way you do about the Linux kernel, I suggest you start a project with the goal of trying to take the code in the Linux kernel and modularize it.
Modularized kernels also have some performance problems. Whereas monolithic kernels tend to use up more memory (due to everything being in the kernel), microkernels require all of the various parts to communicate with each-other. This creates overhead. Thus, I suggest the following solution.
I think the best solution is in a modular development process of the kernel, but a monolithic+microlithic end-user experience. To avoid serious regressions, development process should be modular (e.g., end-users can choose to get the 2.4.19 USB2 or the 2.4.20 USB2, thus avoiding regression issues). For things which the user knows he or she will always be using, why should they be separately modular, having to communicate with eachother and create over-hang? For things which the end-user will sometimes or rarely need in the kernel, it makes sense to use the modular approach, and only load them when needed, despite the overhang (because their use is rare).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Little guys doing big things. Keep up the good work and I hope big Evil (M$) gets denied. A product that work. M$ could try that for a new business plan. QNX=Champions.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
I check /. from my Audrey all the time! That was my first experience of QNX & I have to say, it's pretty rockin'.
hahahaha! Robert Howard had a way with words!
I forget which book now. Conan is older, he has some young mercenary thief protege. There's some older hot babe queen who is desirous of a little young guy action, and the whole episode and their adventursome quest depended on her getting her lustful wishes. The protege is a little nervous, Conan says something like ---> "Lad, be ye not a fool! This Queen is neither unattractive... nor unwilling.....neither!"
Linux is not a UNIX; if some marketeer said it was he/she would be promptly sued.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
VSTa is a free software OS inspired by QNX and Plan 9. Very nice looking, although when you run it very disappointing (it's slow).
/extremely/ fast operation. Some have suggested that Linux be refactored into an exokernel-like arrangement for multiprocessing: rather than trying to build a 256-processor single memory image Linux kernel (with all the horrid locking issues that implies), just build a 4 processor kernel, and when more processors are available, run multiple instances of it under an exokernel.
Much more interesting to me is the concept of exokernels, a completely different OS organization which allows for
(The most significant person who's pushing for this plan for Linux, by the way, is Larry McVoy, notorious author of BitKeeper.)
-Billy
Perhaps I should have said 'battle ship'. I meant it in the more generic term (neither knowing, nor seriously caring, about the exact class of the ship that got blue-screened).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The lack of a journalling file system is particularly worrisome, since QNX is often operating in an environment where the power could be pulled at any time.
What makes you think the QNX native file system is not journaled? Even if it isn't, QNX systems are often running in embedded ROM with no writeable "file system" present at all.
If you're going to be anal about this sort of thing, at least be right.
The Yorktown (CG-48 and the Navy's first stab at a 'smart ship' ) is a Ticonderoga class cruiser. Its combat systems direction system is called Aegis. I don't remember its actual Navy nomentclature. And yes, I'm surprised it didn't rust to the pier in Pascagoula, MS.
I think all the rest of us were just jealous of Building 48, and the fact that her crew was effectively on shore duty.
The civilian formerly known as ET1(SW)
TRM
how well does QNX run from a first generation pentium (133mhz, no mmx)? it sounds like it does not need a lot of memory. the computer i'm thinking about is a 133mhz laptop, no mmx with 16 or 32 mb of ram. do they have a network install? this laptop does not have the ability to boot from cdrom. it does have a floppy that it can boot from though.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
NT/W2k/Xp/2003 machines with /3g in the boot.ini boot description will pop up the dialog. This is because the kernel is split 3:1 in that case.
I find it ammusing that you can remember the parameters for the WinMain() and MessageBox() (and are hence a API programmer rather than MFC or some other evil abstraction layer :>) but that you didn't know about the kernel split option.
I bought V4 cost me 1K (pounds) with a student discount, it came with a packet of premium Canandian cookies, how cool is that! :)
But the best part is the speed at which it loads. My version is currently node locked to a 64Mb DX2 '66 it has a real soundblaster16 in it, (the first bit of PC kit I ever bought, I scrounged the rest :) it has an old IDE hard disk, and a SCSI disk hooked up to an internal SCSI Zip disk adapter. As far as I'm able to tell, (it detected the SCSI "adapter" when I installed it) QNX boots from the IDE disk, detects the SCSI BIOS, and then loads the OS from the SCSI drive. It does this in 4 seconds from inital drive seek to displaying the login prompt, it has sound blaster support, It doesn't have a USB port.
I actually bought the QNX implementation of X too, as well as the Photon runtimes, and I can highly recommend the floppy, (in both NIC and modem versions) it really is a marvel of modern science :)
It's also the only thing the Canadian government will let near a Nuclear reactor, (at least it was) it really is a very, very cool OS!
later
jb
I trust WinCE to run my heart monitor if I ever end up in an Intensive Care Unit... *cough*
Please note: arrangements have been made to fulfill your request.
Sincerely,
Grim Reaper
PS> See you soon!
I think you should read more about the subject, before making this kind of false affirmation.
That was pretty reliable...
Maybe but has any company other than Disney released Pixar (run by Steve Jobs) flix?
From the article I linked to: "as soon as February 2003, when Pixar delivers Finding Nemo and is contractually free to start negotiations on a new partnership, he'll likely be looking at a distribution deal elsewhere."
I'm holding off until it comes out on DVD.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here's an FTP link.
A BitTorrent link should be coming soon. It should show up here in a couple hours.
according to the feature list (http://www.qnx.com/products/ps_neutrino/features. html) it supports Hitachi SH4 processors, does this effectively mean that with a little effort it could be ported to dreamcast? that could be interesting
I registered online with them 3 years ago to send me a free version of their O/S. They did!!! I was very much impressed by QNX, and especially from the Photon MicroGui. It is very easy to develop for, and has quite a good IDE. The only thing missing was Drag-N-Drop.
Can it ever replace Windows on the desktop, I wonder ?
Here's a BitTorrent link.
> From the article: "QNX has been the only company so far to commercialize a microkernel OS..."
Doesn't the Mac OS X operating system use the Mach micro-kernel? Doesn't Apple sell the Mac OS X operating system? Therefore, QNX isn't the only company to commercialize a microkernel OS.
I have written software to control industrial machinery that ran under MSDOS.
I KNOW of which I speak.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Maybe, if you DITCH the idea of an OS process, and control the hardware directly, you'd have a fucken clue.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Well ... the few times I've done or seen programming on Windows it's been Win32. I've shied away from MFC ... for various reasons ^^; But originally because I wanted to know how stuff really worked. (This decision was also around the time I started learning intel assembly and basic architecture.) My mom (also a CS person) has had NTSP6 and 2k, but by this time I had started running Linux, so I never really learned as much about boot-time options and such for NT-derivative systems.
That's pretty neat, though. I wonder if I should hack up a split= command line param for Linux, just for fun, some time.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
So what? Just because something doesn't happen doesn't mean it can't.
DOS doesn't really have a kernel perse as any application can just hoist it and re-write it as it sees fit.
A true kernel like that of QNX, linux or [shiver] WinXP does not let a rogue/buggy application walk over the OS.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
So many people say it. So many times. Over and over and over again. Even people who remember code wasn't released until it was as fully tested as could be and code/path coverage tools were used to verify test coverage.
I'll admit even I have at times doubted a useful OS like QNX could be *bullet-proof*. But after having been shot down enough times for waisting company time writing *bullet-proof* code -- even code going into security evaluations, I admit to have lost touch with the reality of 'shit' that passes for coding these days.
I've been shut out of design sessions because I was known as someone who wasn't likely to compromise on quality of design. I was known as someone who would say 'no' to new features at the last minute and painted as a 'slacker' because people would "infer" I'd pad my schedules -- when I was oft-times under-reporting the time costs because the reality of doing it 'right' the first time would be too expensive to accepted. I've often been told I'm difficult to work with because I am unyielding unless *convinced* otherwise. Compromise would not be an option. Convincing me differently would be.
I've too often had stoopid pinhead managers who thought they could do a task in 3 weeks that I'd schedule 3 months for and should have scheduled 6-9 considering what they really later claimed to have been demanding in the design.
Excellence in design is often called 'over design', or 'overly complicated', but the fact that it can handle all the corner and edge cases never anticipated as input is what makes for such design.
Excellent code is *ART*. It's not engineering -- "Programming as engineering, is often 'crap'. You can't 'engineer' things that have never been done before. Engineering is taking known principles and designs and using them to replicate previous results. Thinking that Programming is engineering is one of the more critical mistakes people make. You can't truthfully create predictions about things that have never been done before. Something other managers can't handle -- programming isn't linear. It starts out slow, testing a theory, testing an algorithm, alot of thinking until...the light comes on and you see the solution. Then you can bring that design to life. Managers that attempt to manage by "milestones" destroy this creative process -- do you think Michalangelo painted the sistine chapel according to 'milestones'? I don't even know that he knew what he was going to paint until it was painted, but I doubt he was asked for daily or weekly status reports.
Yes -- it is true, you put 100,000 monkeys to work on a keyboard and you might come up with Windows -- or even large parts of linux, but it is more the exception than the rule that elegant, artful algorithms are used: "duh, they don't fit on 1 80x25 screen, they are too complex", or, "microkernels are too slow, we don't want that", or "you can't have self-healing code, it's not possible. If you had code that broke, are you really going to trust that other code can correct it?" (quote less than 1 month old from some list I'm on).
Uh...yes...QNX does exactly this. It's good to see there are still some quality computer scientists out there.
I did some WinCE development and it is a nasty OS. Any medical device running with it should be banned and scrapped.
Now, the excuse for that was that you couldn't run complex software on an 8088. But QNX seemed to refute that assumption. Not only did it run well on very small, slow machines, it was highly clusterable. It was years before DOS/Windows had anything like the same sophistication or scalability.
I always itched to try it, but high licensing fees kept me away. And everybody else too, except for a few niche applications. I'm glad QNX is still around, but when I see what a mess we've ended up with, I have to view it as a great lost opportunity.
QNX is a has been OS, it is good if you have alot of time to port code and deal with its costs. But it never caught on because of licensing costs and the time it took to get it "compatible". Good effort, but costs too much in dollars and time.
The Aegis is such an big thing that I have often heard them called Aegis cruisers. I have heard them talk about that new DGs as Aegis class ships as well. You are of course correct that it is a Ticonderoga class. I just used Aegis beacuse it was easier to spell :)
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.