The Status of the QNX OS

Eugenia writes "OS enthusiast Thom Holwerda gave a spin to the latest version of QNX RTOS, a very capable OS that unfortunately doesn't get a lot of press. With the recent sale of QNX Software to Harman International the future of the free-for-personal-usage version of the RTOS is uncertain. Nevertheless, the article presents quite a few aspects of the OS, including an introduction of the Neutrino kernel, installation, the Photon MicroGUI, hardware support, usability and more."

Comments

Open Source QNX

[RAMMS EIN]

Now. This is a good place to put it.

With all the cloning of OSes that goes on in the OSS world (UNIX clone, Windows clone, BeOS clone), why are we not making an open-source QNX clone? QNX is a fantastic OS in terms of architecture, flexibility and standard-compliance. If QNX goes under (like Be), this will all be lost. Let's start the photocopiers!

Re:Open Source QNX

[Curtman]

why are we not making an open-source QNX clone?

There is, its actually a prequel called The HURD

Re:Open Source QNX

[Anonymous Coward]

There is, its actually a prequel called The TURD

Re:Open Source QNX

[turgid]

With all the cloning of OSes that goes on in the OSS world (UNIX clone, Windows clone, BeOS clone), why are we not making an open-source QNX clone?

What are you waiting for, then? :-)

Re:Open Source QNX

[aled]

There will be a Live Hurd CD with a demo of Duke Nuke For Never, real soon now.

Re:Open Source QNX

[squiggleslash]

I remember seeing ads for QNX back in the mid-eighties in various (UK) computer magazines. I'm pretty sure QNX predates the start of development of the HURD.

Re:Open Source QNX

[Curtman]

Very true. QNX began around 1980, and ran on 8088 and 6809 machines. Apparently QNX was originally called Qunix ("Quick UNIX") until AT&T asked (threatened) them that they had better change the name. Quite an interesting history behind it actually.

Note for the humour impaired: Just for the record, I wasn't being serious.

Re:Open Source QNX

[Pseudonym]

You start the mailing list and I'll join it.

Anyone remember the QNX Demo Disk?

[vasqzr]

1.44MB. Web browser, modem/network support, blah blah.

Pretty neat at the time. Heck, it's still neat.

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

That was the one and only time I ever used it.

I remember reading that Dan Hildebrand, the man behind that disk, passed away a few years back.

http://www.openqnx.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =News&file=article&sid=298

Re:Anyone remember the QNX Demo Disk?

[HawkingMattress]

Yeah, this thing rocked. Much more impressive than knoopix if you ask me... Too bad HURD doesn't seem to fly, really.
Maybe they could GPL their OS, and keep only the parts needed to make it embeded closed (if such a separation is possible, that is...). If GNU/QNX was possible, it would mean a lot of market shares for them, and a really good kernel for us. And i'm pretty sure they wouldn't loose in the end, even if some parts they keep closed finally get copied by GPL stuff. They would still be *the* company that can make industrial strenght things with QNX for you, or adapt it to suit you better. And they could charge a premium price for that (well, i suppose they do that already, but still...)

Re:Anyone remember the QNX Demo Disk?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Where do we get "old" QNX 6.2 isos?

LinuxBIOS?

[Doc Ruby]

Lots of people bought firesale "Audreys" from 3Com, which run QNX on a wall-mountable VGA touchscreen + Geode CPU + Flash mem (+ modem, speakers/soundcard, etc). The barrier to porting Linux to it was supposedly the lack of a working LinuxBIOS - the QNX bootloader wouldn't boot Linux (RAMdisk image etc). 2 years later, is there still a possibility of Audrey Linux?

Re:LinuxBIOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

huh?

Whatever

[Elwood P Dowd]

"a very capable OS that unfortunately doesn't get a lot of press."

It gets press among people that care about real time operating systems... dunno what kind of press you're hoping for.

What?!

[passthecrackpipe]

You are an idiot. Hurd is not a prequel to QNX - first of all, QNX has been an actual product for some time now. Secondly, just because hurd and QNX both share some high-level, overall design characteristics, doesn't make QNX Stallmans' bitch. "I thought of it first" doesn't count, because the idea of microkernels goes way back before either. finally, if you would have bothered to read TFA, you would have realised that QNX is not unix (hey, where have I heard that before) in that a whole lot of stuff simply works different. Unix and microkernels don't play nice together. Idiot.

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Unix and microkernels don't play nice together.

Uh, then what is Mach then? Darwin? Mac OS X?

Flamebait is damn straight.

The *amazing* 1.44 MB Demo Disk

[RAMMS EIN]

That demo disk was truly amazing. One disk, needing only a 486 with 16 MB of ram (or was it even 8?) that gave you an OS, GUI, web browser and server, and all amazingly fast.

I recently tried running some OSes under the QEMU emulator; most of them crawled, but QNX screamed. I find it fantastic. I can't get over the fact it won't install in extended partitions on PCs, though.

Re:The *amazing* 1.44 MB Demo Disk

[Brandybuck]

I can't get over the fact it won't install in extended partitions on PCs, though.

That's because extended partitions are a Microsoft thing designed for Microsoft operating systems. The only reason Linux does it is because Linux was specifically designed for a dual booting PC architecture. BSD doesn't do it, Solaris doesn't do it, and QNX doesn't do it.

Way back when, you installed an OS into its own partitition. Within that partition the OS could organize things however it wanted. UNIX decided to subpartition things one particular way. Then LATER Microsoft decided to do things completely different and did the extended/logical partition thing. Unfortunately, their scheme is totally f*cked. For example, you can only subpartition the last partition.

The easiest way around this is to simply use primary partitions. Windows will bitch at you, because Microsoft decided in their less infintessimal wisdom that you should only have one primary partition, but you can still do it. Give Windows partition four, and put QNX on one, two or three.

p.s. Of course, it doesn't help matters that manufacturers decided to ship systems with one giant 120Gb extended partition, but hey, that's not my fault either.

Re:The *amazing* 1.44 MB Demo Disk

[Brandybuck]

Someone modded this down as a troll? WTF! Did I piss someone off, and if so, how?

Re:The *amazing* 1.44 MB Demo Disk

[TheRealMindChild]

QNX can only boot from a primary partition on the primary drive.

Re:The *amazing* 1.44 MB Demo Disk

[Brandybuck]

As an embedded real time operating system, that's no big deal. How many embedded devices do you know that have two harddrives, let alone the need to boot from the second?

Re:The *amazing* 1.44 MB Demo Disk

[drinkypoo]

I wouldn't mod it troll but I would suggest that it's stupid for a PC operating system that can handle the fdisk partioning scheme at all to only support half of it. The fact is that the ms-dos/fdisk scheme is the standard for partitioning on PC and that's why just about every PC OS has a method for using it to organize its partitions to some degree, even if the whole OS and all the partitions it can see are contained in a single partition.

Re:The *amazing* 1.44 MB Demo Disk

[Anonymous Coward]

I modded you down because it's against /. groupthink to badmouth GNU/Linux.

Turbo Smorgreff, vote for HawkinsOS!

QNX

[Is0m0rph]

We're running QNX 4.25 for our control software on our newest tool. It runs well and can handle a lot of system control with not a lot of computer power. 800mhz P3 QNX 4.25 box can handle hundreds of IO operations, logging of virtually everything, data sampling, SECS/GEM, etc with very little CPU used. When the control system is upgraded we'll be running 6.0.

QNX and AmigaOS

[rubberbando]

At one point QNX was supposed to be part of the new AmigaOs. Its such a shame that fell apart. *sigh*

Ups and downs

[Anonymous Coward]

To clarify, Neutrino is the (current) OS and QNX is the company (to confuse things, QNX used to make an x86-only OS called "QNX" or "QNX-OS", which is quite similar to, but not the same as, the multi-architecture neutrino).

I have some experience of both programming for neutrino and some business-development work on projects aiming to deploy neutrino. I have both very positive and rather negative things to report.

On the upside, the Neutrino OS is generally excellent. It's very responsive (from a real time perspective) and the system and device APIs are nice and clean, pleasantly symmetric, and well thought out. Writing device drivers is a much more pleasant business than it is on linux or windows. The microkernel stuff really isn't visible to a user, but it makes the low-level developer's life a deal easier.

Photon is okay. It's fast but rather old-fashioned, and its C API is crufty and rather a pain to code in. It's rather thin on higher-functionality widgets and one has to do more heavy lifting when implementing one's own widgets that I'm used to. It doesn't have a more modern graphics API (like GDI+/quartz/java2d) and that's a bit limiting when one intends to use it for TV/Video stuff (settop boxes etc.); again, I can do it myself, but it's more heavy lifting than I'd expect on other OSes. Support for audio and media is so-so, and I don't believe there's any 3d support. None of this is a problem if you view Neutrino as a high-end embedded OS (as opposed to a desktop OS) but even there - I'd rather not implement a nice post-Tivo setop UI or a high-end incar navigation system on Neutrino - it's all doable, but its rather too much work. Photon is clearly architected for speed and real-timey-ness (it's single threaded, like swing), rather at the expense of programmer friendliness. One has to ask, however, if it's really worth the time of the idle user learning photon, and the low number of free and open source (and heck, commercial) programs using it shows that most developers haven't learned it. There is an X-server for neutrino, but I really don't know anything about it or the degree of toolkit support on it.

The real problem with Neutrino is (or was, maybe things will change under the new regime) QNX (the company) and their business model for selling neutrino. It's not that they're dumb or mean guys, but things conspire to make the independent developer's life (and particularly the free/open-source developer's life) discouraging. Here's some of the problems I faced:

1. Neutrino is closed source, and in practice much more closed than say Solaris on Windows. There's a _lot_ less example code floating around, either from official sources or other developers, and QNX's documentation is mostly "what this call does" not "how to do XXX".
2. QNX's support (the paid, and not at all cheap, support) isn't all that good, and several times has seemed like a branch of the sales department - a couple of times I asked for API docs for module interfaces that clearly existed (as QNX insiders had written a bunch of plugins of one kind or another) and was told I could (for a significant price) licence the source code to the particular element. That's no good - first off I don't really think I should have to pay (again) for just an API, and secondly I really don't want to be reading through some code to answer my question.
3. QNX is a pretty small company, and its engineers have their hands full. So device support is limited and rather behind-the-times. Folks have a view of embedded systems that they're little boxes like Audrey, but a firewall or an airport-information-system or a storage array can be a pretty big-ass piece of iron, and it's reasonable to expect to use some new, high-end cards. Bar some drivers ported over from xfree86, QNX's answer seems to be "our custom-engineering department will write it for you". Again, I understand why things are this way, but that doesn't make it encouraging, and when I can turn around and get a free or low-cost driver for wind

OT: your signature

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding your signature, America is a whole continent with many countries, very different one to another. So I don't know what it is worse, if the US "being so 1984" or ignorance.

Re:OT: your signature

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, America is a pair of continents connected ny an isthmus. More specifically, the Isthmus of Panama. If you're going to be picky, at least check your facts.

QNX is a great OS

[xtal]

I've had the opportunity to work with QNX a lot, but never on a commercial project - I've seen it lose out to embedded Linux flavours, 1VxWorks and OS9, and even WinCE. QNX has great memory managment, is extremely robust, and has an acceptable IDE available. The IPC and messaging model they use is great. The windowing kit is nice - the GUI is a little dated, but you can make it do some neat tricks.

Unfortuantely for QNX, it's got mediocre driver support (e.g. plan on writing 'em, or paying extra for hardware that does) and it's liscencing fees are not competitive with embedded linux or BSD. Neither of those are as robust as QNX in terms of hard realtime behaviour, but for most applications they are "good enough".

Not enough people get exposed to QNX, and it's hurting them - but not as badly as the wide availability of free unix alternatives. It is a great product though, unfortunately, I can see it going the way of a lot of other great products that the market ignored. :(

I enjoy using the noncommerical version of QNX to stay up to speed on RTOS concepts and development, and I have a hobby project of trying to do engine ignition timing off a standard PC that I trust to QNX - something I wouldn't trust to linux, just yet.