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Building a QNX 7 Desktop

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Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#71

Post by TickleSteve »

eikenberry wrote: post #70
Animats wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Photon GUI, there was a bar at the lower right of the screen showing how much memory was in use. If you tried to start a program and it wouldn't fit, you got an error message. Existing programs continued to run, but requests for more memory might return an error. In the real time world, you don't ask the OS for memory after startup for anything critical.

> In the real time world, you don't ask the OS for memory after startup for anything critical. What?

Dynamic memory allocation is frowned upon in both embedded and real time environments.

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#72

Post by nickpsecurity »

feld wrote: post #55
tyingq wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cisco doesn't use QNX Other than on their most expensive, powerful routers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_XR

Wow, I forgot that even existed. Here I was thinking of every switch, firewall, and routing product they've done except this line. I guess it doesn't help that I've never had a reason to touch one as every carrier grade router I've used has been Juniper. I wonder why they went with a whole new platform based on QNX when you don't benefit from a realtime OS if all the packets are moved in hardware? Must be something a…

It's a highly-reliable, ultra-responsive, self-healing OS w/ plenty of middleware and supported architectures. Also easy to develop on. It's already 90% to their goal for their OS and software. Why not use what already works? If it makes them enough money, they could try to develop something similar in-house.

EDIT to add jacquesm's comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14231160

Mine on Lobsters summarizing a lot with links:

https://lobste.rs/s/ensbd6/building_blackberry_qnx_7_desktop...

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#73

Post by nickpsecurity »

Animats wrote: post #64
frik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Fuchsia is a capability-based, real-time operating system (RTOS) being developed by Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia 15 years ago I waited for GNU Hurd, but now I am very interested how Google Fuchsia turns out. What I read it shapes up nicely, and I can imagine we all will use it in near future instead of Windows and other binary blob legacy operating systems; it might also replace Linux a…

That's going to be interesting. Some of the people at Google working on it are ex-QNX people.

Oh hell. I was initially skeptical but my hopes are up now that you say that.

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#74

Post by nickpsecurity »

Frenchgeek wrote: post #25
shmerl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux. The bummer is that it's not FOSS.

Funny there doesn't seem to be an OSS attempt of something like it... ( Or my google-fu is weak )

Minix 3 for reliability part, DROPS for real-time part, OKL4 for mobile, and Genode for security part are basically it that I'm aware. It's really the mix of capabilities in one system that makes QNX great. I don't know anything that has that despite the architecture described in great detail in freely-available papers. Just waiting to be cloned or improved on. :)

http://www.minix3.org/doc/reliable-os.pdf

https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/drops/overview.html

http://l4hq.org/projects/kernel/

https://genode.org/about/index

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#75

Post by swiley »

asdaksdhksajd wrote: post #69
swiley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux has 9p2000 support, I've never heard of people actually using it to export devices over the network though. Fuse also has support for ioctls and other weirdness so it's not impossible for something like sshfs to forward /dev over the network.

no.

Oh wow you're right! I don't know where I got the idea that fuse handled ioctls from.

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#76

Post by detaro »

saosebastiao wrote: post #62
mcpherrinm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can run GCC on Windows, another proprietary OS....

Running software is different than distributing it, and this is from a QNX engineer so I'm assuming this is being distributed by QNX.

And what license problem do you see with distributing it?

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#77

Post by saosebastiao »

detaro wrote: post #76
saosebastiao wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running software is different than distributing it, and this is from a QNX engineer so I'm assuming this is being distributed by QNX.

And what license problem do you see with distributing it?

I don't know, I have trouble understanding the implications of the nuances of the GPL. This doesn't sound any different to me from the various violations of the GPL that were pursued by the SFLC on behalf of the busybox creators, but maybe it is different in some way that I'm not seeing.

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#78

Post by vram22 »

fest wrote: post #51
vram22 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

While I haven't used Erlang, I have used other systems with nice messaging systems (PX4 autopilot and ROS) so I will try: 1) Data is passed between threads/processes using a message bus (essentially, a queue). This means, no need to synchronize data access, as every subscriber gets it's own message copy. 2) Suddenly, you need access to certain data from another module. If the program was architected as regular class…

Very interesting; thanks. Reminds me vaguely of CORBA.

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#79

Post by detaro »

saosebastiao wrote: post #77
detaro wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what license problem do you see with distributing it?

I don't know, I have trouble understanding the implications of the nuances of the GPL. This doesn't sound any different to me from the various violations of the GPL that were pursued by the SFLC on behalf of the busybox creators, but maybe it is different in some way that I'm not seeing.

It would be an issue if they didn't share the source code with him or other users of the software (assuming there are modifications to it, but that's very likely the case). From the blog post I see no reason to believe they wouldn't provide it (especially in this case, where the "user" is one of their own developers)

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#80

Post by bitmapbrother »

Animats wrote: post #64
frik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Fuchsia is a capability-based, real-time operating system (RTOS) being developed by Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia 15 years ago I waited for GNU Hurd, but now I am very interested how Google Fuchsia turns out. What I read it shapes up nicely, and I can imagine we all will use it in near future instead of Windows and other binary blob legacy operating systems; it might also replace Linux a…

That's going to be interesting. Some of the people at Google working on it are ex-QNX people.

I know some are ex BeOS people, but I haven't heard of anyone from QNX on the project. Apple did hire the founder of QNX not too long ago, though.
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