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.

Comments

QNX: +'s & -'s, real experience

[Bozdune]

I worked with QNX for several years, '92-'95. During that time period, QNX dropped its "QNX Windows" product in favor of its new "Photon" product. The old product was junk; unfortunately, we used it heavily. Photon's schedule kept slipping and I went on to better things before Photon became a reality.

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.

Boing-QNX

[greywire]

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.

Expense and Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Why it matters to Amigans

[Sloppy]

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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