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QNX OS on a floppy
jmaggart writes "QNX Software Systems is offering a downloadable demo of their "realtime" OS that uses a POSIX filesystem and comes complete with a GUI that supports windowing, a dialer, browser, and a webserver.
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So, perhaps Hemos should post that Linux is
available, in case some people missed it?
If it's old, it's old. That you haven't heard of
it yet does not make it new.
I think I'll download it to see what neat new stuff they've packed into it.
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If you where an OS expert you'd know microkernels are a superior design concept but have suffered performance wise since they leed to more syscalls (ie trapping into the priveliged mode of the CPU) However QNX is not a good example of 'high' performance microkernel. There are microkernels that are high performance. L4 (a microkernel) runs a User level Linux (L4Linux) server at 110% the speed of native linux a 10% slowdown on a quick port is pretty good and you get more flexibility. :)
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~disy/L4 if your interested in finding out more on high performance microkernels
Cheers WeirdArms
P.S. I'm not bagging QNX, its nice specially since its a 'complete' system.
Follow this link to the Small FreeBSD home page for more information
BTW, FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT users should have a look at their /usr/src/release/picobsd directory.
ERROR /.001: INCOMPLETE ARTICLE
Expected: "Microsoft Sux!" Got: End of file
Just don't expect the commercial software industry to not try and cover their costs through sales. TANSTAAFL.
Or are you among the OSS advocates who are advocates because they like free (beer) software?
WHERE'S THE RECIPE FOR THIS BURGER ??? AND THESE FRIES !??? WHICH CANOLA OIL DID YOU USE TO FRY THEM !??? WHERE'S THE SOURCE TO THE CASH REGISTER APP !?? I WANT TO CHECK THE SOURCE TO MAKE SURE I GOT MY BILL RIGHT ??!??? DAAAAAAAAAAAMN YOU AAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLL !!!!!!!!
Having worked at Burger King one summer[1], I can tell you that we actually are supposed to let people know these things if they ask. Well, except for the cash register system; that isn't really our problem[2] (although your bill is).
We did get asked occasionally (twice, I think), too. Some people have food allergies, and these folks were probably saved a potentially fatal reaction.
Maybe you could have picked a better example for something that would be stupid to open source?
[1] Lest you be left with the impression us open-source zealots are unemployable losers flipping burgers, I now work as a programmer for a major defense contractor, making a lot more money. Oh yes, we've contributed at times to some of the Free Software we use, too.
[2] When I worked there, most locations ran a proprietary POS app on MSDOS 6.2. The registers were 386s on a 10Mbit LAN, and a desktop machine in the manager's office with a modem link to the "home office".
Berlin-- http://www.berlin-consortium.org
DNA just wants to be free...
The OS is pretty neat, but it could use some open-source thrashing instead of just a few (admittedly smart) guys in Ottawa hacking with it. We experienced a reasonable number of "Blue Screens of Death" (yes, QNX kernel panics bear a marked resemblance to the NT dies we are all familiar with). Probably many of those have been fixed over time, but equally probably new ones have come along. Exposing the source code to thousands of eyes would be productive, I suspect.
We also had some problems with the file system (corrupted files). At that time basically only one guy (Bill, a really smart fellow) was working on the file system, and unfortunately you had to hit him in the (proverbial) nuts with a baseball bat to get his attention. To QNX's (and Bill's) credit, they did fix the problem. However, this illustrates a big disadvantage that closed-source vendors have -- namely, in many cases only one dude can do the work, whereas open-sourcers can call on help (and patches) from around the world.
The OS does fit in a remarkably small memory footprint, and its messaging system is very fast, even between machines. It was a good and stable framework on which to build a meta-messaging applications layer. Our customers were astounded at the up-time of their QNX-based systems, as opposed to the Micros~1 competition.
QNX suffers from the same problem as all proprietary operating systems -- you have to call them when you have a problem, and their attention to you seems to depend on how much of their business you represent. In 1995, it appeared that they were focusing heavily on the embedded market (set-top thingies, etc.), and were more-or-less in standby mode on the general-purpose OS side. I haven't seen anything to indicate a change in direction in the last few years, although Photon appears to be real now. Also, I should admit that I haven't been watching that closely.
As far as QNX pricing is concerned, it was very reasonable for OEM quantities. I would encourage anyone to contact them to get a price quote. They seem to be willing to structure a deal, unlike some larger companies we know.
It depends. If you want to use the OS that this disk actually demos (QNX4) or if you're really interested in embedded applications, you'll have to ask QSSL, and I bet it's not cheap.
On the other hand, in relation to the Amiga... QSSL has licensed their Neutrino OS for use on Phase 5's new Cyberstorm/Blizzard G4 boards for free. (Well, "free" except that you'll spend a few hundred bucks for the PPC board, and you need an Amiga to put it in. ;-) The license might actually apply to the PPC port of Neutrino in general (not necessarily P5's hardware), but I'm not sure about that, better check before you get in trouble. This Neutrino PPC port will come with development tools, probably just GNU stuff like GCC. And instead of being intended for embedded apps, this is intended for use as a general-purpose OS to take over the world, crush Windoze, Linux, AmigaOS, etc, etc. ;-)
Anyway, that's the deal. QSSL is courting Amiga hackers and developers to come over to Neutrino by offering it for $0. It's very tempting and many of us are biting.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'll do this really fast.
;)
Real-time systems are special-purpose operating systems.
A real-time system is used when there are rigid time requirements on the operation or a processor or the flow of data, therefor it's often used as a control device in a dedicated application.
A hard realtime system GUARANTEES that critical tasks completed on time.
Modern operating system features like VM is (almost)never used in a HRTOS, also, the data is usually stored in a ROM.
A "good" use of HRTOS is found in, for example, weapon systems.
As you might have understood the HRTOS is tightly linked with the H/W.
In soft real-time systems there are still time-critical tasks. They get priority over other tasks until the critical task is completed.
Solaris is a SRTOS, and is by far superior to Linux on good H/W(PCs sucks rock).
This is VERY short description, if you want to know more you'll have to wait for me and my brother to set up our homepage, not a time-critical task I hope
"Last words are for fools who haven't said enough." - Karl Marx
1. QNX + Phase-5's PPC is being pushed as the "new Amiga".
2. The QNX OS and this one disk demo is really no big deal to Amiga folks.
3. AmigaOS is pretty modular, more so even than most Amiga folk realize: most of the ROM which one might think of as the "kernel" is really just library modules that get opened like any library on disk. I'm pretty darn sure a similar demo could be created with AmigaOS.
4. QNX is not free. More power to them. However "free" is almost always good, and that's one reason I think that AROS (an opensourced Amiga OS clone) is a better future for the Amiga than QNX.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
For the bloke who doesn't know why it has the chequered ball...
:)
Amiga Inc originally asked QSSL to provide them with the OS for thier new box, (when there was still going to be a new box) then Amiga Inc did what they do best, (screw up) they bailed in favour of Linux.
QSSL being the truly stand-up types they are, pledged to com through on thier promise of support to the Amiga community, and (with or without Amiga Inc) create a New OS for the Amiga based on PPC architecture based on Neutrino which they'll give away for free...
On the subject of expense, *YES* it is bloody expensive, I paid 1000 pounds (UK) for the OS, Photon TCP/IP & Voyager runtimes, and X and an X dev licence, but if you register then you're entitled to free upgrades, etc. Thier tech support is really very good, (they got someone to knock me up a custom touchscreen dev kit...)
It goes fast on a 486, and it guarantees an interupt in 27 Microseconds, (even on a 386sx 25)
Trust me, this shit is *WAY* cool
I'll be happy to trade insult and injury here:
jb@eso.org
I downloaded the demo a few months ago. It auto-detected all of my hardware (all I had to tell it was keyboard layout). I connected to my ISP on my first try and started using its HTML 3.2-compliant browser. Then I decided to see how much it could handle. I opened about 5 browser windows and 5 3D QNX logo windows and didn't notice any slowdown.
There is network support in the demo for well
over half a year now.
There are also one disk Linuces.
I went to the site hoping to find something truly interesting, like a QNX demo disk-like thing that was BSD, so that I could modify it and do what I want with it (mmmm, cheap X-terminals).
Call me when you have X on there.
I tried the QNX disk, and was extremely impressed. Ever since then, I've wanted to buy a copy. Alas, I cannot currently budget for it.
Hmmm, what about those "mini" X servers I heard about a long time ago? What's happened to them? We can do some really neat stuff with those.
Just an addendum to some of the other comments here... There's a reason that Amiga refugees are particularly interested in realtime OSes compared to people from other backgrounds.
One of the neat things about the Amiga is no matter how high the load is, or how slow the machine is (even the 7 MHz 68000), the GUI always looks and feels very fast and snappy. That doesn't mean it really is always fast, it's just that the gadgets (widgets) are responsive because the code that handles them runs at a higher priority than "normal" stuff, and the Amiga uses an absolute scheduler. This probably sounds like a pretty unimportant point to most people, but once you've used an Amiga for many years, you start to build up subconcious expectations from a GUI.
It's still relevant because even 1999 computers are still too slow. My boss's 400 MHz NT box, for example, when it's running a CPU-bound app (even just one of them), and it seems especially common when there's disk activity, the GUI gets slow. Intolerably slow from an Amiga user's perspective. Yes, I'm saying that a 400 MHz NT box is uncomfortable to use compared to a 7 MHz Amiga. I hope this isn't interpreted as flamebait. :-) Obviously there are many other factors that determine a computers overall speed and usability, but the Amiga's responsiveness is one of those factors that Amiga users particularly cherish, perhaps because other platforms haven't considered it to be as important.(?)
QNX and Neutrino's ability to guarantee that certain things will happen in a certain amount of physical time mean that it will be possible for them to have GUIs that are as responsive as the Amiga's. I honestly don't know yet if Photon has that virtue or not (it probably does, but that's just a guess), but the point is: with Neutrino, it's possible. Amigans are looking for that sort of thing.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It now supports HTML 3.2 and JavaScript.
Yes, they have a network version now. Worked fine with my ne2000 clone card.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
QNX is the only totally modular OS that I know of. It's truly a microkernel OS -- all the kernel does is message passing, process creation, memory management, and timer control... drivers, filesystems, even the scheduler runs as separate processes. It requires only 1.95 sec to do a full, user-level context switch on a Pentium-133. For those Mosix fans out there, it inhernetly supports running processes on remote nodes in a network of computers.
See http://www.qnx.com/products/os/qnxrtos. html for more.
Their website says that its "now multiplatform!", which is news. Previously, it ws an x86-only OS.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
While this may be old hat to some, I doubt I'm the only one to be new to this.
Install was simple; I ran the install script and rebooted. After loading, I was prompted to select a geographic region and a screen resolution. While the color depth was limited to 256, the resolutions went fairly high.
Dialup setup was easy; I entered my DNS address, username, password, and authentication method. I was connected on the first try at 48,800. Don't even bother if you have a win modem.
The 3 plug-ins worked nicely, but the telnet client was the most useful. I was able to check my e-mail and edit files, ect.
The web server worked like a, ahem, charm. Just don't try to
serve and browse at the same time. Browser performance was flaky after
the first hit.
The web browser itself was like an older version of Netscape, but
with fewer features. Data transfer performance was sluggish compared
to other platforms. On the whole, though, the system was usable.
Yahoo, CNet, ZDnet, Deja.com, News.com, and of course Slashdot rendered
nicely.
This seems like something that would be a nice supplement to all
those mini one disk Linux distros out there. Sometimes a portable
GUI browser is nice to have. You guys/gals should give this a try.
Btw, I'm using the Demo to type this review:-)
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Not the demo, the development kit? Seriously...this demo is worthless because (last time I check it) you could only play some silly Java puzzle game since that was the only webpage on the server. You also had to have pretty standard hardware (3Com NIC, etc).
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Now, if I could modify this sub 1.5MB wonder to include the ONE driver for the hardware part I really need...and have it serve up a single webpage with links to my primary websites...then I would think this is very very cool indeed.
Imagine the next time a user's system isn't working: he or she boot this preconfigured floppy (which has the exact drivers needed for that system), which then connect to a server, uploads the data directory, pulls down a new image of WinNT or whatever, reloads the data and voila! The user has fixed his or her own system and I didn't even have to know about it.
This would also be terrific for web-based training programs...a user could pop in a "C++" disk that would be preconfigured to take them to the C++ training program on a CBT server.
So how much is it gonna cost me to be able to develop this kinda diskette...or am I only going to be able to use the QNX operating system on embedded devices?
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing