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Operating Systems Software

The Status of the QNX OS 30

Posted by michael from the how-do-you-pronounce-that-again? dept.
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."
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The Status of the QNX OS More

The Status of the QNX OS

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

      There is, its actually a prequel called The HURD [gnu.org]
      • There will be a Live Hurd CD with a demo of Duke Nuke For Never, real soon now.

      • What?! (Score:2, Insightful)

        by passthecrackpipe ( 598773 ) *
        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

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:Open Source QNX (Score:5, Informative)

          by Curtman ( 556920 ) on Thursday November 18, 2004 @04:19PM (#10857969)
          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 [schoenbrun.com] behind it actually.

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

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

  • Anyone remember the QNX Demo Disk? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 ) <`vasqzr' `at' `netscape.net'> on Thursday November 18, 2004 @01:47PM (#10855928)

    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 [toastytech.com]

    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 [openqnx.com]
    • 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* compa
    • 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 (Score:5, Informative)

        by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Friday November 19, 2004 @12:05AM (#10861746) Homepage Journal
        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.
    • Where do we get "old" QNX 6.2 isos?

  • LinuxBIOS? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday November 18, 2004 @02:21PM (#10856368) Homepage Journal
    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?

  • Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Thursday November 18, 2004 @03:06PM (#10856986) Journal
    "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.

  • QNX (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Is0m0rph ( 819726 )
    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.
  • At one point QNX was supposed to be part of the new AmigaOs. Its such a shame that fell apart. *sigh*
  • 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 hardwar

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