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Unix Operating Systems Software

QNX RtP 6.2 World Preview 209

Posted by timothy from the cuteness dept.
Jason writes: "OSNews is running an exclusive preview of the brand new version 6.2 of the QNX realtime operating system. The article is going through the installation process, the Photon user interface (lots of screenshots included), the internals, and the advantages and disadvantages of the OS as a desktop system. QNX RtP 6.2 is expected to be released for free (for non commercial usage) before March."
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QNX RtP 6.2 World Preview More

QNX RtP 6.2 World Preview

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  • Why would anyone use (Score:2, Redundant)

    by wiredog ( 43288 )
    A real time OS as a desktop system? I've worked with embedded/real time systems and performance in that world is different from performance in the desktop and server worlds. QNX has a nice looking GUI, but who would need it in an embedded or real time application?

    Real time OS's Have Issues with performance on the desktop, just as desktop/server OS's Have Issues in the real time space.

    • Ya that pretty true, but QNX as they say, was built for people who wish to know some more about real time os'. and it does that job pretty well :)
    • From the article:
      QNX RtP is serving as the self hosted development platform for QNX-based internet appliances and other QNX embedded applications.
    • I think the point of the GUI is to allow for a self contained system in which to develop products using QNX. This is a nice idea as it allows you to compile, run, test, debug rather than compile, transfer, run, debug [remote/local]. Where the transfer stage adds yet another stepping stone in the development cycle (ok for large changes, but if you are tracking down a small bug it's a PITA).

      From the article it seems like the tools and apps that are for QNX RTP are there to make the developers life less painfull (eg. the media application) and it's not for a general purpose desktop - and why can't developers have a nice GUI?

      Just my 2 pence.

      Regards, Chris

    • 1 - self hosted development: it is generally intended to be the embedded developer's desktop system, not a general purpose desktop system

      2 - GUIs are frequently used in embedded/realtime systems. Factory control systems, health monitoring & analysis, PDAs.

      My $0.02 (Canadian)

    • Real time OS's Have Issues with performance on the desktop

      Yeah, but the main "issue" they have is that they are so damned fast that users think it must be a trick.

      What's good for RT, is good for everyone.

    • QNX has a nice looking GUI, but who would need it in an embedded or real time application?

      Unix geeks demanding CLI-only interfaces aren't the only people that use embedded or real-time systems.

      Scenario A) An embedded device controllable by the enduser: Gas pumps, POS terminals, ATMs, PDAs.

      Scenario B) A realtime system with a non-realtime front end: medical scanning systems, manufacturing control systems.

      A million more scenarios exist. Embedded RTOS aren't only for unseen automobile smog sensors.

  • QNX goes back a *long* way (Score:5, Interesting)

    by InterruptDescriptorT ( 531083 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:11AM (#2876114) Homepage
    Do any Canadians (perhaps only Ontarians) remember the ICON computers they used to have in elementary and high schools? The ICON, also known as the 'Bionic Beaver', was a computer manufactured by CEMCorp (Canadian Educational Microprocessor, IIRC) that was meant to bring data processing and computer skills to thousands of high-school students.

    The design of the machine was interesting--intelligent nodes running an 80186 connected by ArcNet to a central server node--but they ran a version of QNX. I remember the slightly different set of commands than we are familiar with in UNIX: for example, to go up a directory, it was 'cd ^', files could be deleted with 'zap', and commands could be easily run on remote nodes by prefixing the command with [nodenum].

    It was on this machine and OS that I cut my teeth in C, 80x86 assembly and basic networking concepts (I wrote a small multi-node chat program using the virtual circuit calls in QNX), and as such I was always have very fond memories of it. Thanks for letting me reminisce. :-) (BTW, if anyone has one and is planning on getting rid of it, I'd gladly take it off your hands.)
    • That would probably have been a derivitive of QNX 2.x. We used QNX 2.x exclusivley at a company I worked for. It was our desktop system from accounting to engineering. All running on ARCNet.

      Since then QNX has moved up in the world. QNX 4 has full posix compliance and is very much like a normal *NIX. 6.x is so much like *NIX on the command line, that you can barely tell the difference.
    • I believe that we had some Unisys machines running some varient of UNIX (possibly QNX) early on in grade school (here in Ontario). There was no mouse, instead we had a trackball on the upper-right corner of the keyboard and two keys labelled "Action" on the either side near the top. Does anyone else remember these?
    • Ahhh the Icon. With the built in trackball; I remember the movie maker app, and the 'choose your own adventure' real-life sim type thing. With Danny, I think his name was, the pot-head.
    • This is very interesting to me, the computer of which you speak. Any idea where someone could buy one? And yes, I have the arcnet network to hook it up to.

      But to think, 80186's in a desktop computer, networked with arcnet, running a non-mainstream OS? I'm already in love. I just hope they get along with my TRS-80 Model II.
    • Ahhh the ICON's. Those things were great. There were several variations of the ICON. The ICON I's were huge things with a built in montitor/keyboard/trackball/cpu all in one unit. The ICON II's and III's had more in common with the original iMac's: CPU and monitor in one unit, and the keyboard/trackball a separate piece. Those things used 386 processors.

      I actually really liked the trackballs on those systems, it was really easy to move the ball around with your hand and press the Action button with your thumb.

      And anyone remember Offshore Fishing? That game was great.
      • Offshore Fishing! Except that in French schools in Ontario it was called Pêche En Haute Mer. IIRC, the whole system was translated into French, but I had gotten in trouble so many times fooling around with their DOS computers that they watched me like a hawk and I never got to see the QNX CLI.
      • Offshore fishing was great, but what I remember was a game called 'Upstairs / Downstairs', one of the first graphical networked multiplayer games. Our school wore out a bunch of those trackballs playing that game. :)
    • Our school had them (Oakville Trafalgar High School... class of 92).

      I fondly remember the 'ipaint' program on the ICONS--that program where you could create vector-based animation by drawing key frames. Also, there was that really cool chemistry lab program.

      Most of the kids at school grudgingly used them--I remember it had some sort of 'PC Compatibility' mode, and they tried to teach kids WordPerfect on them. Wordperfect under the DOS compatibility mode was brutally slow though--felt a bit like wading through a pool of bubblegum. I tried to stay away from them as much as possible.

      I had one friend that waded through the reference manuals for the ICON, and actually did quite a bit of development under them. That was like him though--always wanting to figure out what made things tick. While most of us were content with DOS, he was mastering UNIX, QNX, C, and this wierd thing called 'Usenet'. I can honestly say he knew more about the ICON than anybody else at the school, including the Comp. Sci teacher/sysadmin.

      There's no doubt there was some inner beauty to the ICON--certainly, it was a very interesting network architecture. Alas, this was all hidden behind horrific applications and a cumbersome user interface.

      I think the ICON is what you get when you let the government design computers. All the right features, on paper they should have been great...terrible execution though.

    • Alas, QNX! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      Never heard of these machines, but as you describe them, their design makes a lot of sense. At about that time, I was working for Convergent Technologies, which mostly made systems that ran CTOS [angelfire.com]. Like QNX, CTOS had a message-passing architecture [qnx.com], and was thus very well-suited to distributed computing. QNX has always struck me as more elegant than CTOS, though.

      When I left Convergent, I ended up working with 8086 and 80286 systems -- and found the limitations of MS-DOS really painful. QNX was then being marketed as a DOS alternative. They claimed to be able to do serious multitasking on 8 mhz systems. I actually found that claim credible, not to mention tantalizing. But I never got a chance to test it. The QNX license fees were just too high.

      It's a real pity QNX wasn't in the picture when IBM was shopping around for a PC OS. History would be very different!

    • Do any Canadians (perhaps only Ontarians) remember the ICON computers they used to have in elementary and high schools?

      Yup. Used 'em in Grade 7/8 IIRC at Stanley Park Senior Public in Kitchener, ON. (Grade 7 would have been '89?) -- I got booted out of the room after a while for dicking around at the command prompt they boot up with, trying to get in to something I had no idea about at the time.

      I've got one now (had two) -- they cut off the keyboard though, and I've got to figure out what pins go where (the connector's gone) but I'd love to boot it up again. You've got the specifications exactly right: 80186 (basically a controller version of the 8086, it includes the PIC, DMA, PIT and a few other of the 82xx-series of support chips in the processor package itself), I think about 640k of memory (weird staggered-SIPP package), arcnet, EGA or VGA display. Gray case that boots up blue and spends 99% of its time displaying blue background. :-)

      I bet you could get something like ELKS running on it without much trouble.

      Man... I remember the *sound* of the room they were in. the server(s) (I believe we had two, one for each double row of ICONs, about 20-24 ICONs per server) with physically ENORMOUS hard drives and fans and fans and fans... in a room with no sound suppression. It sounded like a large colo facility does today, I bet.

    • Yeah I do remember the ICON. I graduated from Highschool in 87. When we first got them in 84 nobody knew how to use them.

      I remember we all wanted to get ROOT user access since this would give us super powers. The teachers had no clue as how to use them and just looked at these monsters like monsters. Then one day a teacher was clueless and let some kids watch over his shoulder and to see the ROOT password. Within a couple of hours the entire network came crashing.

      The problem was that nobody knew what they were doing, students included, and the "hacker" copied the entire operating system from the root directory to his directory. But instead of a copy it was a move. The network came to a screeching halt for a week since nobody knew what to do.

      After that everyone was more nervous... Ahhh... The good ol' days.

      But what was cool about the ICON was even in 1984 it worked in a multi-tasking environment. Not like the networks of C64's or Commodore Pets with its muppet network system.

      Ok I am OT with this posting, but let me go really OT.

      Before the ICON we had Commodore Pets networked together with a serial cable using the muppet network. The muppet network was not intelligent enough to figure out who was writing what and when. Therefore if somebody wrote to the printer or the disk while someone else was already doing something the two would get joined. So you could end up with a printout that was the concatnation of two documents. To get around this we had to yell "Writing", "Printing" and "Done". At the same time somebody had to go to the chalkboard and draw an X.

      Wow, now things simply work!!!!
    • I remember using one of those ICONs and making a mistake while using a diskcopy command. I was attempting to make an archive of a floppy disk's image onto the hard drive, but instead it made a low-level copy of the floppy onto the hard drive. Suddenly the 20Mb HD was convinced it was a floppy, and needless to say, the system wouldn't operate anymore. They had to ship it back to the manufacturer to be low-level formatted again.
    • Oh yeah, I remember Icons. We used them at Waterloo Oxford DSS for Grade 11 Comp Sci class as late as '93, when I took the class. The classes consisted of self-directed units on the fundamentals of programming using BASIC.

      I remember I would complete the two week lessons in a day or two and spend the rest of the time getting into trouble, such as the time I recreated the entire login screen, ASCII art and all, in a BASIC program. Using a friend's account, a few of us installed it all around the lab and waited for people to log in at which point their passwords were logged to a file. The only problem was we had nowhere to go after that, so the program just displayed some lame message asking the user to reboot their computer. Almost everyone did, except for the guy whose computer backed towards mine. Needless to say I was caught, chastised, and never hacked anything again. ;)

    • See cleannorth.org [cleannorth.org] if you're interested in these things. We get tons from the school board here at every event. They're still trying to get rid of them.

      If you want to try to make arrangements to get some from us, I urge you to (we're in boonie-land Canada, though).

      -Dan

    • I programmed QNX 2 for 3 years for use in medical diagnostics instruments and I have to say it was the worst, most nasty OS I have ever used. Yes it did multitasking, but the tools were diabolical, the compiler was a joke, it had an ugly OpenLook-like UI, it was proprietary and not in a good way and it cost a lot of money. I have no idea how it ended up inside mission critical software because it looked like a hobbiest OS gone bad. It didn't even have a decent editor and I had to port MicroEmacs to it. It's only saving grace was it was fast, realtime and had some natty messaging protocols.


      Quantum made a very wise and sensible decision with QNX 4 (what happened to 3?) to go Posix since it made the OS tolerable and almost Unix like. Still, by that time I was getting restless feet and I moved onto bigger and better things. I still wonder about the company I left - I bet there are poor souls working there who have to fix problems in QNX 2. May god have mercy on their souls.

    • Indeed. I went to an Ontario high school and gradualted in 1993. By 1993 we had a lot of macs and PCs, but in the earlier grades we used them a lot.

      We did elemntary programming using logo and later Pascal using the ICONs. I never remember doing any C with them, but by the time I started learning C it was 1992, so I was on to PCs by then.

  • I generally know that the Neutrino microkernel is faster than Mach, but have anyone ever made (and published the results of) performance comparision between Neutrino, Mach and L4 ?

  • First Impressions (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jaavaaguru ( 261551 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:23AM (#2876160) Homepage
    As someone who's never used or seen QNX before but has seen many other OSs, I like the first impression this gives me (going by the eye candy). Some questions I need to know the answer to:
    • Does the calculator [csolutions.net] have a paste feature? This is something really lacking in KDE's one. And it bugs me when I can't be bothered adding two file sizes together (or typing the sizes into the calculator)
    • Will the interface always be as consistent as it is in the screenshots? - the Macs at school always had consistent user interfaces. With the advent of Microsoft Domination we witnesed horrible UIs that were exremely inconsistent. They can't even make their own apps [microsoft.com] have the same UI as their OS [microsoft.com].
      These shots of QNX make is seem like they've missed out all the bad features of other OS's and included all the good ones. I like it.
    • Does the web browser [csolutions.net] perform as fast as the other ones that are currently in use? (IE, Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera) and can it render the majority of pages that Konqueror can?
    These are just some things that people notice.

    • Re:First Impressions (Score:4, Informative)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:25AM (#2876167) Homepage Journal

      You can always get Opera [opera.com] if you want.

      • You're right! :-)

        I always feel though, that the OS's native browser (the built in one) should be good though. Sometimes I just want to get on and do work without having to get extra software. I know that's bad for the industry, etc, but c'est la vie. From experience, the later versions of Konqueror meet this requirement - being just as fast as Opera on the same system (Hmmm... Opera has definitely got an good thing going there), but I've yet to see another OS where this can be experienced. I've heard Mozilla is available for it also but don't see any mention of it on Mozilla's site [mozilla.org] (on a top of the range PC you don't tend to notice the speed differences and the UI/standards support is more of an issue)
    • Eye-candy and RTOS?

      To me there are alot more important issues in a RTOS than the eye-canday... response speeds, QoS guarantees, robustness etc.

      And robustness and pretty UI's usually don't go well together as alot of pretty UI's break the KISS rules...

    • Hello Point... you've missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:43AM (#2876244) Homepage

      Its a real time operating system for embedded devices. The PC based platform is for development to help you rather than plugging directly into the RS232 port of your dev kit.

      The questions you ask are nothing to do with an RTOS but looking at it from the perspective of "Oh look a Windows competitor" this is NOT in the same market as even WindowsCE, although there is some overlap. The PC based platform is to aid development, it can be stripped down to a delivery box but this is not for Joe Sixpack PC user.

      The real question is "Can anything else run in a couple of Megs of RAM..... or less" and have guarenteed delivery times on tasks. The answer for Linux and MS-Windows is NOPE.

      THIS IS NOT A DESKTOP OS.

      Sorry for shouting but people should

      a) Read the article

      b) Understand that MS-Windows and bloatware are not the most interesting market in the world.

      c) Realise that cut and paste on a VCR is a silly idea.

      • Re:Hello Point... you've missed it. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:47AM (#2876264) Homepage Journal

        You're totally wrong. QNX Neutrino is a bottom to top OS from tiny machines to clusters of high power hardware. QNX has pushed their OS on thin-cients, Internet Appliances, etc, it isn't just for embedded monitoring hardware. Indeed the big QNX push is "QNX on a floppy" that basically turns a PC into an IA.

        • Internet Appliance != Desktop (Score:4, Interesting)

          by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @11:15AM (#2876388) Homepage

          And an internet appliance is a minimal spec box, possibly without a hard-disk that has a cheap screen (possibly touch screen). Again its not aimed at the Microsoft market so the original point still holds. The cluster stuff is for specific tasks and not the desktop. The point is quite simple. Not every OS out there is meant to run the same way as windows, there is a wonderful world out there of OSes that are aimed at different tasks, all too often Slashdot is concerned, and its readership only aware, of the MS style of market.

          OS/390, AS/400, EPOC, QNX etc etc etc... well cool OSes for paticular circumstances.

          • Sure it's aimed at the MS market! Just like BeOS would love to replace your desktop, QNX would love for you to use their OS as your desktop. The reality is that the world is such that that is almost possible: With more and more apps being web based, the reality is that QNX with Opera or some other reasonably full featured browser can be satisfactory for most users. Of course QNX is a full OS (it just happens to put stability in front of everything else), meaning that technically there is nothing that can't be done, and of course right now you can do most anything you'd want on QNX.

            • Cluephone ringing... Pick it up! (Score:1, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward
              *sigh*

              You're absolutely fixated on the eye-candy, aren't you? The point is that QNX is NOT ABOUT THE GUI *OR* THE DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT!

              It's like asking what sort of graphics card is on the database server. Interesting, maybe, but the whole point is NOT about the graphics.

              They are in NO WAY interested with QNX in taking over the desktop market! The GUI is ONLY there to aid EMBEDDED APP DEVELOPMENT! Nothing more! QNX RtP is NOT aimed at being a full-featured desktop Personal Computer replacement, ala Linux. The only thing the GUI would be good for is an Internet Appliance environment where most of the interaction is through a graphical engine.

              But guess what! Most of the time QNX is used, you don't see much in the way of graphics, and even less of any sort of a windowed environment. See that gas pump running QNX? Yeah, it's got a pretty graphics display showing a car going through a car wash, but you *certainly* don't cut and paste anything.

              And QNX would *only* love for you to use QNX as your desktop because you would hopefully be developing an embedded app.

              • Do you recall when Amiga was in talks with QNX to see about basing the new Amiga PC on QNX? Funny thing, but QNX was a very willing participant in those talks. QNX has also coupled with quite a few vendors making full-featured IAs (IAs are just "non-Microsoft desktop PCs": There's nothing super duper special about them), and quite a few are based on it. QNX is _VERY_MUCH_ about "eye candy" because that's one important facet of computing.

      • &nbsp&nbspc) Realise that cut and paste on a VCR is a silly idea.

        But cut 'n paste on a development envirenment is not a silly idea. Its almost mandatory. Hell, you probably have cut 'n paste in your VT without even a GUI.
      • Umm (RtP == RealTime Platform) *is* a desktop os.

      • Desktop QNX (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @12:05PM (#2876647) Homepage Journal
        THIS IS NOT A DESKTOP OS.
        Actually, that's not true. QNX has always had a lot of desktop features, and was originally sold to that market.

        At one time QNX's realtime features worked in favor of its use on the desktop. That was 20 years ago, when processors were wimpy, and attempts to create GUIs based on DOS had pathetic results.

        Of course, QNX's window of opportunity to compete with NT, or even Linux, has long since closed, So the development efforts and the marketing noise emphasize embedded and realtime apps. That's why the Photon GUI is so dated, and the interactive apps are starting to clash with the desktop apps. These are things that could be fixed, but never will be. The reasons are economic, not technical

    • If you had read the review, you would have known that the Voyager web browser supports a pluggable HTML engine, for which Opera [opera.com] has made a plugin [opera.com]. So yes, it renders HTML at least as well as Opera 5. :)
    • I never used the KDE calculator. I recommend you learn bc [gnu.org] .

      Usually you'll start a session on an xterm and make calculations as needed, but

      echo "34 * (7 + 5000)" | bc

      works too. Better than bc, only a real HP48G within reach. And yes, I would kill for a Palm calculator application with 1/3 of the HP48G functionality.

    • You are wrong about KDE's calculator not supporting cut and paste. If you right click on the calc's "display", the value is copied to the clip board. If you middle-click on the display, whatever is on the clipboard is pasted in.

  • Who is this reviewer? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by djweis ( 4792 )
    Does he have any background in embedded systems? He seems about as qualified as me reviewing pacemakers. I think prettiness is overrated in a system like this.

    • Re:Who is this reviewer? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dhuff ( 42785 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:57AM (#2876308)
      "He" is a she - Eugenia Loli-Queru. Eugenia [osnews.com] is Editor-in-Chief of OSNews.com. Before moving to the U.S. she was a web-designer in the U.K., ported more than 80 Linux/Posix/DOS applications to BeOS and founded the BeUnited BeOS Development Movement in April 2000.

      As for a background in embedded systems, I'm not sure - but she is certainly more qualified than you suggest, having experience with many OSes incl. BeOS, AtheOS and FreeBSD among others...
  • Here is a banner example that sometimes rewriting software does make sense. Since 1985, QNX has rewitten thier OS three times, first QNX 2.x, then QNX 4.x and now RTP 6.x. All rewritten from scratch and all better than the last.

  • A simple OS for mom (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pengo ( 28814 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:32AM (#2876188) Journal

    Maybe this is it. Show her how to dial up with the modem, use launch the email client and web client and find a version of AIM and there you go. I imagine that because it's UNIX(like), you should be able to run it non-priviliged without problems or fear of someone else messing it up.

    Has anyone tried running this on slow hardware? (Such as a P133 or something w/32 megs ram?) How does it fare?
    • QNX 4 (the bootable floppy version) ran just fine on my old k6 200 + 32MB RAM. I guess it should work quite well on your computer, too. But I'm not so sure about Mozilla, sice it has pretty high system requirements to run normally. But I think the OS itself and the apps that come with it should rune just fine. After all, QNX is used in VCRs and similar devices which do not have an athlon/pIII inside them
    • My understanding and one of the common grips about QNX for the desktop is that QNX is POSIX-like and not UNIX-like. Remember, POSIX is not UNIX. Small yet distinct difference. Perhaps this has changed from years back but I know that used to be a very common misunderstanding and complaint once someone tried it out as a desktop system.
      • My understanding and one of the common grips about QNX for the desktop is that QNX is POSIX-like and not UNIX-like.

        QNX 6.something is now available for download from QNX's web site -- I installed it last weekend and played around with it a little bit. It appears that most of the user utilities are taken from NetBSD, and the configuration file tree is structured very closely after BSD. The system library claims POSIX compiance, and the kernel claims conformance to the realtime POSIX API.

    • Re:A simple OS for mom (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nhavar ( 115351 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:53AM (#2876289) Homepage
      The slowest machine I've set this up on is a P75 w/32 megs of ram. It worked fine although with the video card I had it couldn't get to higher color depths. Amazingly I didn't have to do anything to configure the modem, sound card or NIC and everything ran fine. Really helped a novice get on the net quick and play a few games that they like to play. No need to spend $600 for a new PC just so someone can surf the net and get mail and play card games, dust off the old PC and slap QNX on easier than a Mandrake install.
    • So far, I've run this on a Cyrix M333(it really runs at about 250MHZ on a socket 7 architecture), a 333MHZ PII, a 550MHZ mobile celeron, and it's been almost as fast as BeOS on all those machines(BeOS was the fastest modern OS I've ever seen -- it ran sweetly on a p90, which is more than I can say about Windows "we won't install on anything less than a p200" ME.)
    • Rmember the I-Opener [i-opener.com] that everyone was so happy about sucking up and hacking [slashdot.org] to run Windows/Linux/NetBSD/whatever? The original I-Opener is pretty much exactly what you're describing. It booted up, allowed a connection to the internet, and that's about it. Too bad it died, but then again, most people don't want internet appliances. They want an all-in-one PC.

      -Steve

  • Very Cool (Score:1, Interesting)

    by TRoLLaXoR ( 181585 )
    Having run QNX RtP 6.0 and 6.1, I have to say I'm waiting with baited breath.

    6.0 was excellent, but patch B killed TCP/IP networking. Either that or the driver for my NIC was bad. Performance was good on even 32 MB RAM.

    6.1 was an improvement mostly in the details: small little useful features were added, driver support was added, performance tweaks were added (try playing 32 MP3s simultanesouly on a Windows 2000 box with just 32 mgs of RAM!), and overall it was what one would expect from a secondary release.

    If 6.2 is anything to 6.1 like 6.1 was to 6.0, I'd say the QNX guys had found the right pace, although it'd be nicer to have these updates every 6-9 months instead of every 9-12 months.

    I'm running QNX RtP 6.1 on a dual Pentium Pro system, each proc has the 1-meg L2 cache and is overclocked to 233MHz, and 32 megs of RAM (going to a gig soon).
  • I used QNX a while back and really liked it, although I could *never* get my sound card working. It found everything else just fine. It'll be interesting to see how much more (if any) hardware it supports now. I had trouble compiling a few things, but nothing that I couldn't live without. Plus, it comes with Doom and Quake 3 (at least the older versions did).
    • Unless anything is new since the last time I used it, Quake III only works with a Voodoo-based graphics card (not even sure what version of Voodoo... probably 3)

      Anyways, I tried it back with v4, liked it but had no use for it, almost put it on one of my machines when v6 came out, but it still had that nice little isa network card problem that had plagued me before (3c509b, when it comes to non-mainstream OS's it causes more problems then it's worth, just ask any BeOS user)
      • Sigh.... I really should follow my own advice some time and RTFA (read the fine article)...

        "[...] and 3D support seems to still only work with Glide and Voodoo3."

        Well, guess that answers that...

    • Re:QNX (Score:1)

      by ext ( 313171 )
      Quake3!? I thought it only ran in Linux,win ans mac!
      Maybe you meen quake1?
  • QNX is a good project for throwing on that old machine or for use as an embedded system (it's currently the operating system of my cable modem).

    I'm waiting before I install on my main machine, however. I've been following the progress of QNX for quite a few years now and I'd like to say it's coming along quite nicely, just give it more time.

    Oh and don't praise it or knock over it's desktop appearance. Desktop is about the last thing I look for in an OS (if it's that bad I can always create a better way myself.. hrmf).

  • QNX: longtime (semi) embedded player (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RatOmeter ( 468015 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @11:04AM (#2876343)
    As has been pointed out in other post(s), QNX has been around a long time. In fact, they first called it Qunix, but AT&T (Bell Labs) slapped'm down on that long ago.

    I'm heard first-hand testimonials attesting to its bullet-proof operation which makes it a great choice for controlling machinery. You can also install, de-install just about any service/driver/app without needing to reboot.

    Where I work, we make large, expensive automated testing equipment (lotsa horsepower, moving parts, other dangerous shit). We wanted to eval QNX about 3 years ago, but they told me they only provide free eval copies to their $100K plus customers. We make about 7 to 12 machines per year; they slammed the door in my face.

    Now (and their previous free non-comm version) that the've got a pkg I can use to eval, it's too late. Even if we were still in a position to choose QNX, I doubt we'd easily forget our previous snubbing.
    • Many companys are eager to make ammends for customer service screwups to keep up a good reputation. You might do well to extract your vengeance upon QNX by calling up their customer service department, explaining your grievance, and then asking them to do what their conscience dictates they should do to set things right. This strategy doesn't work 100% of the time, but I've had good luck with it on numerous occasions, with remedies ranging from discounts to free services and merchandise. The worst thing that could happen is they refuse to deal with you; in which case you just take your business elsewhere. Of course this is all assuming you would ever have a desire to use their products for future projects.

  • Amiga (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Snowfox ( 34467 ) <snowfox@sMONETnowfox.net minus painter> on Monday January 21, 2002 @11:14AM (#2876383) Homepage
    A reminder that this was originally going to be the OS used for the new Amiga hardware, before Amiga up and went in a strange, new direction which didn't involve new hardware.

    I guess this is a peek at what the new Amiga could have been. It doesn't look as nice as 3.9, though the underlying technology is pretty neat.

    • Wow.

      You have actually managed to include the word "amiga" in a post to slashdot without immediately being moderated down and told to "let the amiga die peacefully" and other equally tedious replies amiga fans usually get.

      congratulations :-)
  • QNX RTP really is a fine little OS. Runs great on older machines, has a nice GUI and a wide range of applications for it. The built in browser, Voyager, is pretty good. Oh ya and there is a version of Quake III for it.

  • Some hangups. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @11:14AM (#2876385)
    QNX RtP has tons of potential, but there are lots of things holding it back as a desktop OS:

    1) Lack of unified VM/buffer-cache. The size of the disk cache is fixed rather than dynamically adjusted depending on need.

    2) Lack of proper swapping. Since swapping kills embedded apps, RtP lacks good swapping. Use of swap has to be explicitly coded into the app, and was implemented as sort of a hack to allow gcc to be self-hosted.

    3) Real-time scheduler. The hard-real time scheduler might be nice on an embedded system, but on a desktop system (where fairness takes a back seat to user-percieved responsiveness) it doesn't work well.

    4) Crappy disk subsystem. I don't know if this problem has been fixed in 6.2 (I doubt it) but RtP has a really slow disk system. The IDE drivers have issues and the filesystem is ancient.

    Some of the numbers that RtP shows aren't as impressive as they could be. 0.55us context switches sound great, but Linux can do switches on that order as well. Still, RtP is a great system. QNet, in particular, is very featureful, and Photon totally destroys X in every area except maybe 3D support. It has superlative network transparency, a good (fast) widget set, incredible fonts (courtesy of BitStream's FontFusion) and a nice, lean, architecture. If QSSL would port Photon to Linux (which wouldn't be that hard, given that both are mostly straight POSIX) I'd pay to run it.

    • Re:Some hangups. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      Real-time scheduler. The hard-real time scheduler might be nice on an embedded system, but on a desktop system (where fairness takes a back seat to user-percieved responsiveness) it doesn't work well.

      Huh? Fairness is the enemy of responsiveness. There is no back-seat. On an RT system, if you have your UI run at a higher priority than your cpu-sucking apps, you get responsiveness that Windows/Linux users can only dream about.

      • Traditional schedulers have several problems with GUI programs.

        QNX RtP's scheduler, a straight priority-driver round-robin affair, allows a high priority process to run whenever it becomes ready, even if it is preempting the foregroung GUI process. Its a very static scheduler, which means it doesn't take into account the myriad of issues that result in good UI response.

        Traditional UNIX schedulers try to be fair to each process, penalizing CPU-bound processes and giving better response to I/O bound processes. This, too, has flaws. A CPU-bound GUI process can get penalized when an I/O bound background process (such as a compiler) can get boosted. The scheduler doesn't take into account which process is in the foreground when making decisions.

        The two best schedulers I've seen for desktop systems are Windows NT's and BeOS's. Both treat GUI scheduling as an integral part of the system and take issues such as which is the foreground process into account when making decisions. This is not as "clean" as the UNIX way of doing things, but results in much better user-percieved responsiveness.

    • Re:Some hangups. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Pseudonym ( 62607 )

      I disagree in part.

      1) Lack of unified VM/buffer-cache. The size of the disk cache is fixed rather than dynamically adjusted depending on need.

      I can see why you say this, but in practice I can't see this as a problem. The size of the disk cache is increased with the number of devices mounted. On the other hand, separate caches mean you can implement different buffer cache policies depending on the device. (You can imagine, for example, that flash memory could use a very different write-back policy than disk.)

      Separation of mechanism and policy is something that pervades QNX, and is arguably the key to the flexibility of modern operating systems (compared with the inflexibility of monolithic systems). Even the QNX kernel, Neutrino, is actually a microkernel built on top of a nanokernel. The nanokernel implements mechanism, and the microkernel implements policy.

      2) Lack of proper swapping. Since swapping kills embedded apps, RtP lacks good swapping. Use of swap has to be explicitly coded into the app, and was implemented as sort of a hack to allow gcc to be self-hosted.

      It's not a hack, but I do think it's unfortunate that it's not "officially" supported. It would make more sense to:

      • Determine at boot or configure time whether you want swapping or not.
      • Assuming that swapping is enabled, applications which are granted I/O privileges get all their memory non-swapped. This is non-negotiable. (Why? Because if you have I/O privileges, you can install an interrupt handler. Your interrupt handler had better not access swapped-out memory.)
      • Again assuming that swapping is enabled, any other applications may selectively lock all or part of their memory. (This may require other privileges.)
      3) Real-time scheduler. The hard-real time scheduler might be nice on an embedded system, but on a desktop system (where fairness takes a back seat to user-percieved responsiveness) it doesn't work well.

      You really need a hybrid (and I don't mean RTLinux). Desktop systems need real-time. BeOS users can testify to this. Also, there are new applications such as serving streaming media and ATM routing which really need real-time. Even burning CDs really needs real-time to do properly.

      Admittedly, you probably don't need to implement an ATM switch on your desktop machine, but you might on your server. Real-time scheduling might be a really good thing here.

      4) Crappy disk subsystem. I don't know if this problem has been fixed in 6.2 (I doubt it) but RtP has a really slow disk system. The IDE drivers have issues and the filesystem is ancient.

      That's true.

      • I can see why you say this, but in practice I can't see this as a problem. The size of the disk cache is increased with the number of devices mounted. On the other hand, separate caches mean you can implement different buffer cache policies depending on the device. (You can imagine, for example, that flash memory could use a very different write-back policy than disk.)
        >>>>>>>>>
        Seperate caching policies can be implemented with a unified cache as well. The thing is, that on a desktop machine, the usage of disk cache can vary wildly. At one minute, the user might be running a disk-intensive program like a compiler, and the next moment they might be running a program that doesn't touch the disk, like a game or raytracer.

        You really need a hybrid (and I don't mean RTLinux). Desktop systems need real-time. BeOS users can testify to this. Also, there are new applications such as serving streaming media and ATM routing which really need real-time. Even burning CDs really needs real-time to do properly.
        >>>>>>>>>>
        I think you need soft-realtime, but you have to be flexible about it. Hard-realtime, with its viscious demands on timing, is really not appropriate for an environment where you might sometimes want to "break the rules" and give a process some extra time in order to make the desktop more responsive to the user.
        • Seperate caching policies can be implemented with a unified cache as well.

          True, but I wouldn't like to maintain or debug the code that does it.

          The thing is, that on a desktop machine, the usage of disk cache can vary wildly. At one minute, the user might be running a disk-intensive program like a compiler, and the next moment they might be running a program that doesn't touch the disk, like a game or raytracer.

          By "disk-intensive [...] like a compiler", I assume you're referring to VM performance. Correct me if I'm wrong (I may well be), but shouldn't pages written out to swap or read in from swap not hit the buffer cache at all? (They might if you're using a swap file rather than a dedicated swap device, of course.)

          Games and raytracers aren't disk intensive only because they do their own caching, not relying on the OS to get policy right. Games can be several CDs in size, and are only managable because they're easily partitioned into levels.

          Renderers (including raytracers) aren't so lucky. A Pixar-level scene may have up to 2Gb of gzipped geometric data and 10Gb of texture data, and you don't know in advance what's needed when. Needless to say, professional renderers spend a lot of lines of code managing cached data very carefully.

  • "However, I somewhat got the feeling from the new version that QSSL is moving even more far away from a "desktop QNX." " QNX as a company has no interest in the desktop market and all that it entails. (eg. tech. support, updates, etc.) It is mainly concerned with providing a realtime system for industry as well as providing a decent developement environment for the software that will go into those systems.
  • I haven't seen this OS before, but I wasn't surprised to see it had a primarily Windows 9x-style GUI. Shouldn't we be up to something new? (Even XP, which I sorta like, uses the same old Start button motif).
  • Since you can now pick up old Compaq Internet Appliances [ebay.com] for as little as $39 dollars (233/266mhz, 32MB RAM, 32MB Flash, 800x600 TFT screen), I'm sure QNX could be hacked into one of these to make a very usable and cool looking little browser/terminal! I believe it was also used in the original iopener devices [iopener.net], which had similar specs.

    It's a pity Be [be.com] crashed out of the embedded market really; their BeIA operating system was amazingly efficient. We were developing a system using the Compaq devices as shop terminals, (the versions we had included ethernet ports) and even when running telnetd, ftpd, the desktop (tracker) and the Opera browser, they were using like 18-20MB of their 32MB RAM! Pretty fast too, they could play Flash 4 animations at a decent speed even with pretty slow processors. An interesting thing about the Opera browser on the BeIA platform was that it gradually leaked memory, losing a little every time a new page was loaded. Once the device was over 90-92% memory usage, the browser was killed, and respawned. However, the user wouldn't notice this, as when the browser was killed, it left its image on the screen, then reloaded the last page visited so it was just a slight delay!
  • im on the site and would luv to see the eye candy..but all the pics are shown as dead links for me
  • Maybe I'll make the move from linux to an OS with even LESS supported software. :)

    I have no authority on the matter, but it looks like a pretty cool OS.

  • I'm in love with RtP (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MSBob ( 307239 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @12:11PM (#2876673)
    I played with RtP for quite a while. I love it. I learned so much about OS design just by reading the RtP manuals and I think it has a hell of a potential especially on internet appliances and web tablets etc.

    The beauty of QNX and RtP is the microkernel design (let the flamewars begin). The OS is exteremly resilient because the core kernel just acts as a messaging bus for all other services that run in the user space. For example, should your filesystem crash you can just restart it like any other user space process!. Alternatively if you don't need multitasking capabilities but memory and hardware are at premium you simply don't run proc and don't have to put up with the overhead of a process scheduler. QNX is such a clean design it puts other microkernels to shame. Rock on QSSL.

  • License Fee (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @12:17PM (#2876704) Homepage
    Could you imagine the uproar if Microsoft tried to charge a license fee before you could release an application that ran on the operating system?

    -
    • The reason is simple: the "free" version of QNX is an *evaluation* version. Shareware in other words. In order to release a QNX application you must have the licensed version of QNX.

      This is in many ways the same situation that exists under Microsoft. If you release a Windows app created on a pirated copy of Windows, and Microsoft found out, you're in deep doodoo. QNX at least gives you an uncrippled evaluation copy to use.

      According to my QNX rep, you *can* release non-commercial software for QNX using the evaluation copy. Of course, he's not a lawyer, but a salesman, but I suspect he knows more about it than I.
    • But they do. How would you develop for windows widtout buying windows and thus paing Microsoft. The question is only when do you pay: When you get the os(Microsoft) or when you release the software(QNX)
      I know what I prefer :}
    • Yes. Try releasing an XBox game.
  • I am the Co-director of my schools Technology Department. We have a whole lab of 486 33's with like 16 megs of Ram a piece. Windows 95 just sucks ass on them. And win 3.1 is not an option (We don't have the liceneses, and we don't have the money to spend on them).
    Would QNX be a viable option?
    All we need them for is to Internet surf and write essays, and be able to print to a Postscript Network Printer.
    Is this possible with QNX?
    Are the computers fast enough to run it? Is there enough Hardware support for them (I believe they all are either 486 ps/2s or Compaqs, and they all have 3com cards in them.)
    Thankyou
    • I think you might find RTP would run reasonably well but don't take my word for it. Go to http://qnx.tucows.com/preview/201252.html to download an iso for burning to a CD. If you insert this into the cd drive on an windows box, it will let you make a boot floppy for boxes that won't boot to the CD. Good luck. BTW, you may want to turn of some of the eye candy on the gui (the pointer cam sucks back a few cycles that you can't spare) but I think it might not be too bad.
  • Why is this UNIX news?
  • From the screenshots, this thing looks like a suitable OS for the desktop. And it also looks like that's where they're aiming, considering that they have a package installer installing the GNU C++ libs, and all the other little things that people use on the desktop. I'm sick of everything available for x86, so I'm looking forward to QNX becoming ready for the desktop.

    Am I off-base here?

  • it has much of the same problems other non-mainstream operating systems have, application support. Oh, and 3d accellerator support. I first was introduced to QNX through my 3COM Audrey( http://www.audreyhacking.com ), I then installed it as the primary OS on one of my older machines.

    I was impressed with QNX, stable, fast, easy to setup(auto-detection on all hardware, unlike some operating systems I know...), quake3 ran :D, etc. However, what finally killed QNX for me was the sheer lack of decent applications. Sure it had phirc, abiword, phplay, etc, but those are no substitute for mirc, MS Word, winamp, etc. In the end I ended up dumping QNX, it is ment for embedded systems(Audrey) where it does well, but it simply is not a good desktop OS.

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