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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!"
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
Here's what you DO get (from the Neutrino page):
The QNX Momentics Development Suite Non-Commercial (NC) edition gives you a full self-hosted development environment with the QNX Neutrino RTOS, plus tools, device driver kits, a desktop class browser, and more.
QNX Neutrino RTOS v 6.2.1
* Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP)
* QNX Photon microGUI
* Hundreds of POSIX, UNIX, and QNX utilities
* Distributed processing
Self-hosted C/C++ development environment for x86 & ARM development only. Reference Platform:
* iPAQ (ARM development target)
Driver Development Kits (DDKs)
Libraries and Tools:
* ANSI C, GCC v2.95x optimizing compiler, GDB 5.x, Binutils 2.10.x
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/
NT is hardly a microkernel. A microkernel, according to strict definitions, doesn't include anything like drivers, paging or the filesystem. QNX fits this definition --- the filesystem runs in userspace, and even drivers run as seperate processes that communicate via message passing. In Win2k and WinXP, almost everything runs in kernel space. Heck, in the next version, rumor has it that large parts of SQL and the .NET runtime are going in kernel space! And OS X isn't a microkernel either. It uses Mach, but the BSD server runs in kernel space, and message passing between the two has been replaced by procedure calls.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Sorry, wrong. QNX USB support.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
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
Actually, as far as I remember, they released a bootable iso which had complete hardware support with a huge library of software, and network support - a la knoppix.
But their floppy was phenomenally useful - on a site of several thousand people, I used to use it in preference to windows to troubleshoot network equipment - until the company stopped to buy floppy drives for their workstations by default...
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
I can't believe this got a +5 insightful.
/. or me to give accurate information, go see for yourself.
It's not made for PCs
You are mistaken, I'm afraid. See below.
What you won't find in QNX is USB support
QNX most defiantly has USB support, as I have a Audrey that has it sitting in front of me.
As for the "not meant for PCs", QNX runs extremely well on a PC, with just about everything you need.
QNX also has 3d support, as evidenced in the FAQ here.
To quote:
Photon supports rapid animation, 3D graphics, and realtime trending
through off-screen memory, bypass mode, video overlay, and other
advanced features.
QNX also supports the following:
* XScale processors and boards
* >4G address spaces on PowerPC boards
* more video hardware
* UDMA 66 chipset (high-speed disk interface)
* Enhanced TCP/IP stack - includes IPv4, Unix domain sockets, multicast support
* NFS v3
* Resource database for better device mapping
* Bi-directional pipes
* Block driver DMA
* Enhanced support for shared memory, with full support for creation mode and ownership information
And SMP, which OpenBSD still hasn't included, for instance.
I recommend that anyone who is interested download the free ISO and install it on
a spare computer you may have laying around and see for yourself. Get it here.
Don't rely on
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
That would be the Unisys Icon, either series 1 or 2. They were _not_ dumb terminals however -- the Series 2 used an 80186 (you read that correctly) with 1MB of RAM. The "bulky black box" was the storage system (it had the hard disks and floppy drives) and handled network control. I don't recall what was in the series 1 hardware wise, but it was similar.
The systems used to be popular in Canadian schools because the OS was developed in Canada, as were most of the tools and applications (which were primarily by Watcom). Plus students generally weren't going to be able to install whatever gunk they brought from their DOS machines at home, nor were DOS based virii any sort of threat to these systems. They were easy to manage and maintain, and were good for teaching programming basics.
Do you prefer todays alternative of brainwashing students in The Microsoft Way(tm)?
Yaz.
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.