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BlackBerry Maker To Buy QNX For RTOS & Dev. Suite
Freshly Exhumed writes "Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry smartphones, said on Friday it will buy QNX Software Systems, makers of Real-Time Operating Systems, for an undisclosed amount as it moves to boost integration of its devices with in-vehicle audio systems. QNX Neutrino is a Unix-like RTOS, and their Momentics development suite is for embedded applications for a wide variety of industries. While RIM has offered somewhat limited support of open source projects on its BlackBerry platform, the future of QNX's Foundry27 development project, which uses the Apache 2.0 license, has not yet been mentioned."
QNX is quite possibly the best operating system available. The tools are great, and the OS itself can do some pretty ridiculous things. To start with, it's extremely fast - even with the Photon GUI (another great feature) loaded, it only consumes something like 25MB of RAM on x86, and slightly less on ARM. That's impressive. Then let's go into the clustering features - if they're turned on, then processes are automatically and transparently distributed among any QNX machines on the local network.
On the other hand, I haven't been that impressed with the way QNX Systems has been handling the platform lately. Momentics can't even self-host anymore, and the UI has gotten a lot worse in my opinion. That being said, I hope RIM doesn't do an IBM-style acquisition where they just take the bits of the victim company that they like and kill everything else.
If by UNIX-like, you mean a microkernel OS designed for scalability using message passing at a low level and delivering realtime performance and strong isolation of kernel components, then, yes, it's UNIX-like. If that's how you define UNIX-like, then you're probably someone who has never used UNIX.
QNX has a POSIX compatibility layer, but so do Symbian, OpenVMS, and Windows NT and I wouldn't describe any of them as UNIX-like.
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Last time I played with QNX, I was impressed with how light-weight it is. I understand that it's an embedded OS, but nonetheless you can run it on the desktop, and the UI is extremely fast. I wonder why it isn't used in the same role as those lightweight Linux distros, as a desktop for older systems.
It also has some rather neat APIs of its own, especially those responsible for UI ("Photon").
By the way, if you ever wanted to play with it, it is freely downloadable (yes, that is the x86 version, so it'll run on your desktop).
RIM has finally stepped up to the plate to FIGHT the GOOD against APPLE! YES!
Although I hate to see QNX be owned by RIM, the people who brought us Blackberry (recently completed a blackberry app - icky sticky java with types getting stuck all over the place for no good reason), this is a major massive move by RIM that sets them on the board to fight Apple. Before now it was not even a fair match. Now at least RIM has a chance again.
When I read this I remembered back to the last company I worked for. Their in-house MRP system ran on QNX circa 1993 (The MRP was changed over to Infor in 2008). It was very telling one day when one of the girls told me about the lead (read: only) MRP developer had told her. At a particular point in the MRP he said do NOT Hit Ctrl-S. She asked why. His response: it would erase the hard drive.
Obviously, that's not the norm, but now I'll need a drink when I get home tonite.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Internet on a floppy. Brought me a lot of fun. Boot the floppy, connect and surf away.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Does anyone have a torrent with the current source?
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - Carl Sagan
Interestingly enough, QNX and RIM are both University of Waterloo semi-spinoffs.
Does this mean there will be a new kernel for the phones, and a POSIX userland API exposed to developers? This announcement, combined with previous noises about Flash on BlackBerry, make me suspect so. RIM's JVM and apps are still cripplingly slow when compared to the pizzazz-filled user experience of the iPhone...
Let's just say I'm not extremely impressed with RIM or it's partners of choice.
I'm sure all the end-users and central-config buffs out there LOVE the RIM platform and all.
As someone who's had to SUPPORT one for some time now, I'm much LESS enamored of it.
And I foresee the same exact thing happening to QNX over the next several years. Gradually dragged down by lousy support and indifferent-at-best developers.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
QNX Neutrino I remember as a very promising OS, released for x86 desktop-class computers as a distribution that fitted a web browser, ppp, windowing environment and enough drivers to work as a prototype 'live distro', booting from A SINGLE 1.44MB FLOPPY DISK
I spent many hours playing with it on a Dell pentium 133/32mb laptop. when Palm bought BeOS for its software assets hardly any were ever used. I hope RIM does better. they could make excellent products with an OS that light but powerful.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The QNX microkernel is also used by Cisco in the new CRS3's.
It will be interesting to see what this acquisition will do for RIM.
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Gossamer threads hold you back
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music lover since 1969
Harmon already did. QNX used to run well on most desktop machines and some laptops, so you could self-host and develop for QNX on QNX. That's gradually been broken over the last few years. Harmon is an audio electronics company. Owning an OS company was out of their league. At least RIM is in the right industry.
I used QNX extensively from 2002-2005, and my desktop machine, plus all the machines in a robot vehicle, ran QNX. QNX runs many of the high-end robots; BigDog, for example, uses QNX. Several DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles ran QNX. When timing really matters, and the problem is far too complex for PLCs and low-end microcontrollers, you need something like QNX.
It's really sad. QNX as an OS was very good. QNX as a company, especially their marketing operation, managed to anger developers, customers, and employees, resulting in a major brain drain out of the QNX community.
Despite Torvalds, mainstream computing is moving to message passing between separate processes. Gnome, Chrome, MacOS, and WebKit are all multi-process message passing systems. QNX does message passing far better than UNIX or Linux does. Message passing in QNX works like a subroutine call. Under UNIX and Linux, a message pass involves the excess baggage of turning a subroutine call into a write to a socket, with marshaling for the conversion from message to stream, and with several unnecessary trips through the scheduler.
There used to be much concern about copying overhead in microkernels, but that's less of an issue in modern CPUs. If you're copying material that was just created, as with most message passing, it will be in the cache, and copying will be fast. "Zero copy" systems that play games with the MMU are generally a lose today, because CPU and cache flushing is required to bring main memory into sync before the MMU setup is changed. Unless you're copying gigabytes, that costs more than the data copy.
A rather hard core competitive company will be in charge... Do you even have to ask?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I had once to ask a question on the Handbrake irc channel. I was impressed by the intolerance of the developers to somebody asking an honest question. Handbrake counts its origin from BeOS, which I did not know at the time. http://www.bebits.com/app/3478 If this is the culture they had in BeOS developer community, no wonder Palm could not integrate them. Probably nobody could.
Handbrake has attracted my attention by being a complete tool from a user perspective. However I have ended up using the old good mencoder for my tasks. It does not crash, there are tons of documentation and howtos and it is much faster. My guess is that mencoder developers just listened to their end-users better.
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.