11–20 of 94 posts
QNX was prohibited from giving source out once it was acquired by Blackberry :(
I'm not sure how anyone can try out what OP has posted, is there any source we can hack on?
I used QNX as part of the day job in the 1990's, the reason for using it was real time scheduling and doing stuff for analog broadcast. We had a full 19" rack of 4 Compaq servers, each of them a very large box for a 75 Mhz CPU, with redundancy built in everywhere. Back then QNX was definitely targeted at real time/embedded but you could also just use it like any other UNIX. Ease of installation to a functional X Wind…
Isn't QNX's realtime features the reason why it's been integrated into a lot of automative systems?
Over the last decade, QNX management managed to piss off everybody needed to support their ecosystem - open source developers, point-of-sale systems people, robotics people, hobbyists, and even industrial real-time developers. All the money is is selling to high volume markets, and that meant automotive and Blackberry devices. But that focus cost them brand awareness and a pool of people familiar with the thing.
I hope it gets open sourced when Blackberry goes bust.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't QNX's realtime features the reason why it's been integrated into a lot of automative systems?
Yes. It's also used by Boston Dynamics' robots. Over the last decade, QNX management managed to piss off everybody needed to support their ecosystem - open source developers, point-of-sale systems people, robotics people, hobbyists, and even industrial real-time developers. All the money is is selling to high volume markets, and that meant automotive and Blackberry devices. But that focus cost them brand awareness an…
That's nice, but sad. Until QNX 6.5, there was a full windowed desktop environment, with the Photon window manager. I used QNX on the desktop when developing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle from 2003-2005. Back then, at QNX 6.21, you had the window manager, the Eclipse development environment, Firebird (Firefox before the name change), and Thunderbird. Then QNX marketing cut off the free version, and all the free sof…
The bummer is that it's not FOSS.
That's nice, but sad. Until QNX 6.5, there was a full windowed desktop environment, with the Photon window manager. I used QNX on the desktop when developing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle from 2003-2005. Back then, at QNX 6.21, you had the window manager, the Eclipse development environment, Firebird (Firefox before the name change), and Thunderbird. Then QNX marketing cut off the free version, and all the free sof…
It's what professional routers do run. Well, some of them at least.
We used QNX at my last company, which made high-capacity IPSec gateways. We had control-plane boards and data-plane boards, with inter-board redundancy, which meant that if there was a failure on one of the boards, a standby was ready and functional within seconds.
Part of this was thanks to QNX's QNet, which made IPC transparent over the internal IP network of the system. You could launch and control processes on any other CPU running QNX+QNet, a "node" in the sytem.
It was very cool, and I miss it a bit. I certainly loved being able to kill and restart drivers, which were of course user-processes (QNX is a microkernel OS). Since I was doing driver development work, that was useful ;)
I used QNX as part of the day job in the 1990's, the reason for using it was real time scheduling and doing stuff for analog broadcast. We had a full 19" rack of 4 Compaq servers, each of them a very large box for a 75 Mhz CPU, with redundancy built in everywhere. Back then QNX was definitely targeted at real time/embedded but you could also just use it like any other UNIX. Ease of installation to a functional X Wind…
Isn't QNX's realtime features the reason why it's been integrated into a lot of automative systems?
https://lobste.rs/s/ensbd6/building_blackberry_qnx_7_desktop...
That's nice, but sad. Until QNX 6.5, there was a full windowed desktop environment, with the Photon window manager. I used QNX on the desktop when developing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle from 2003-2005. Back then, at QNX 6.21, you had the window manager, the Eclipse development environment, Firebird (Firefox before the name change), and Thunderbird. Then QNX marketing cut off the free version, and all the free sof…
> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux. The bummer is that it's not FOSS.
I said that ^ last time QNX got brought up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777520
Quick UNix (QUnix, which became QNX "after a brief infestation of AT&T lawyers" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834334) seems to be one of the cooler UNIX designs (and OS designs) out there. (As an aside, does anyone know anything about Dan Dodge's "hand-made modem" referenced in that thread? There are no citations I can follow, I've been curious for months.)
Sure, it probably has its fair share of little insanities (which are not common knowledge due to it being closed source) but it seems the things QNX gets right more than make up for them.
I have three very pointed questions. I'd love answers, suggestions or critique to any or all of them.
1. Does anyone know someone who knows someone [...] who might be able to unearth "the right person to talk to" at BlackBerry about QNX? While I'd probably want to defer the actual conversation to a person (or small group) more familiar with QNX from real-world experience in industry, my motivation behind adding this point is the hope that there may still be some glimmer of interest in a shared-source model, and that - and I really hope this - the source-access shutdown was simply due to insufficient time to refine the contracts (because the buyout was executed at a particularly fast-moving instant in time). My thinking is that BlackBerry doesn't realize the QNX enthusiast community exists because they were shut down, and that if BlackBerry could be made aware of the fact that there are still big fans out there, it might be a simple matter of adding a couple clauses to some super-high-level document to eg re-allow academic access. (Yes, this point has a lot of naïveté in it, but one can dream, right?)
1a. As a continuation of the above question, if I had a question/notation for BlackBerry/QNX, it would be this: a) QNX had a shared-source release, and seemed to be making good progress with that (in short, people weren't running off with the code); b) the automotive industry and other large interests sound like fairly stable considerations for QNX; could this affect (a) in the future in any way? If this were possible, would it be possible for Photon to be included (perhaps with no warranty or code updates)?
2. Can anyone who still has an old copy of the shared-source releases from before the BlackBerry buyout dig out the license files? I'm very very curious to see if there are any loopholes I could edge through sideways...?...
3. There is terribly little easily-findable documentation on the Internet helpful to OS enthusiasts who have ahem stumbled on certain TTHs and want to explore what they have found solely for personal research. While I had success with QNX 4 some time ago (note what I am saying), I'm quite stumped about what to do for any version beyond that. I'm very interested to learn whatever I can here, perhaps via email (where I can share notes too).