I suggest adding 'Blackberry' to the title, will save all the people clicking through who don't know what QNX is
QNX was around long before BB.
Building a QNX 7 Desktop
41–50 of 94 posts
Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop
#42Refreshing myself on QNX I find myself thinking that recent developments in the Linux world ends up being a half-assed QNX clone.
Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop
#43Nice to see QNX getting some love on HN.
QNX is one of the most ground breaking OSs that I've seen in real life and had the pleasure to work with for a good five years as my 'day job'. It was so good that everything else felt (and still feels) both sluggish and cumbersome by comparison. Imagine an OS that never freezes, one that allows you to restart device drivers and upgrade them on running systems. Use remote resources as if they are local. Control hardware in real time from the same machine that runs your desktop. What held it back is that the company that sold it (Quantum Software in Montreal, Canada) wanted to charge for every bit that left their premises and for a long time it looked as if that strategy was going to win them the race.
Then FREEBSD86 happened and suddenly a lot of router vendors had an alternative, then came Minix and finally Linux. Now none of those three are as good at what QNX does best: hard real time, message passing, clustering. So the fit for these other OS's to occupy QNX's niche was never a good one. And so Quantum stayed alive a little longer. I petitioned them for a 32 bit version when they were still fully behind their 16 bit OS and refused to even consider making a 32 bit version because their old product was selling well and because backwards compatibility must have been a hard nut to crack for them.
So, in about 2 years I wrote a kernel that lifted the userland mostly from minix and linux. Added a network stack and if not for some unfortunate affairs it would have been released as open source.
In a way I'm happy that never happened because I would have been the slave of the rest of the world maintaining that. It's one thing to push an application into the world, those things have a life-span. But an operating system will easily outlive its creators. The fact that Quantum was super aggressive when it came to IP also didn't help the chances of a release.
Every day your life is touched by 100's if not 1000's of instances of QNX still quietly chugging away somewhere in the belly of the systems that keep our infrastructure working.
I'd love to see a 64 bit open sourced version of QNX take over, there is really no substitute for an OS with a sense of time. But I'm afraid it will have to stay a dream, the stewards of QNX have never really dared to commit to open sourcing it for real, I've been asking them for long enough now that I feel that will simply not happen.
Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop
#44That'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. 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. Par…
Which professional routers? Cisco doesn't use QNX and Juniper uses FreeBSD. I'm not sure there are any other router manufacturers that matter.
Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop
#45That'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…
[deleted]
Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop
#46That'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…
>all of POSIX is available
That's nowhere near enough for application development in 2017, POSIX is nice, but it's the bare minimum - kind of like WTO rules for international trade, nice baseline, but you still want better deals with individual countries.
> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux.
Given that QNX is closed source, the state of BlackBerry, the NSA leaks, the subversion of BB Messenger security etc., I'd contest whether that's a good idea.
Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think, you could do that easily using ssh with Linux. program1 | ssh server1 program 2 | ssh server2 program3
It's not exactly because ssh can't forward `/dev/ttyS0` It takes more than someone just adding a special adapter to produce such an interface, because you also have to change all of the modem applications that consume the `/dev/ttyS0` interface to also consume the unix-domain or TCP-based interface. Meanwhile with Qnet, an application simply goes open("/net/node1/dev/ser1") and gets the modem attached to node1. Plan9…
It's not at all the same thing, and not as transparent. But just in case someone reading wanted to do remote serial ports on Linux, there is rfc2217 and virtual serial ports. There's a program called ser2net that can bridge them for any program. Also, most serial port oriented software like miniterm, pyserial, etc, has built in support.
Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux. 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. Par…
Which professional routers? Cisco doesn't use QNX and Juniper uses FreeBSD. I'm not sure there are any other router manufacturers that matter.
> Cisco doesn't use QNX
Other than on their most expensive, powerful routers.
Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux. 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. Par…
I find a lot of similar joy working with Erlang. Having a proper (intra-application) messaging system makes a certain class of problems -- problems that you just get used to in Java, and Go, and Rust, and C/C++, and whatever -- just go away.
>Having a proper (intra-application) messaging system makes a certain class of problems -- problems that you just get used to in Java, and Go, and Rust, and C/C++, and whatever -- just go away.
Interesting. Examples?
Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop
#50"Some of us get very excited at the sight of a C program being compiled and linked into an executable. The masses, however, need their entertainment."
Kind of reminds me how I had completely different priorities than other kids in school when I was growing up.