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."

Comments

Please don't fuck this up, RIM

[the linux geek]

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.

Re:Please don't fuck this up, RIM

[RAMMS EIN]

I second the sentiment that QNX is a great operating system. My first contact with it was through the incredible 1.44 MB QNX Demo Disk, which was a bootable 1.44 MB diskette image containing QNX (4.something, I think), with GUI and graphical web browser. Did I mention that the OS was POSIX-compliant and real-time? At the time, Linux and XFree86 absolutely paled in comparison.

While on the topic, I would like to say that I would like to have a desktop OS that provided real-time guarantees (or at least "most of the time"). On my shiny multi-GHz, multi-core, multi-GB-of-RAM machine, Firefox still manages to hang the user interface for multiple seconds when it first starts up and I type something it the Awesome bar. I'd like to at least be able to switch windows and start sending input to another application in = 0.1 seconds! If we could extend the real-time guarantees to a GUI library so that we could have, say, button click animations and other "I got your message and I'm working on it" feedback to respond within certain time frames, that would be great.

A nice lightweight OS

[shutdown -p now]

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).

Re:UNIX-like?

[MobyTurbo]

QNX is a bit more Unix-like than Symbian or OpenVMS or WinNT. It's userland is Unix, with a bash shell, GNU utilities, and so on. So from both an API level, and a user interface level, it's Unix-like.

Now, if you define Unix as "has X11 as its main GUI", you'd have to define such Unixes as early SunOS (using NeWS) as non-Unix, and define OS X as non-Unix when it is Unix(r) certified, while such clones as Linux get called Unix...

You are right of course that a real time Microkernel is not the typical kernel on a Unix operating system, but then again, several Unixes were made with microkernels, especially the CMU Mach variety which powered the Unix known as OSF/1, which had a Unix vendor of none other than Digital Equipment (eventually it got named to Tru64, and is still in production by HP after the Compaq merger). Real time variations on Unix have a long history, AT&T even made one. Maybe your definition of the Unix kernel is "something that resembles the 4BSD kernel", mostly because that's what Linux resembles best, but it would be in variance with the certification authorities' definition, which is API, or the common user's definition, which would be what the userland resembles.

Dont follow Palm

[CdBee]

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.