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QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

blackberry.qnx.com

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Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#71

Post by AlotOfReading »

f1shy wrote: post #43
SushiHippie wrote: post #27

My experience looking at the page as someone who has never heard of QNX: First there is so much text that wants to tell me how great this software/tooling/resources is, without telling me what exactly it is. As I still wanted to know what it is, after reading your comment here†, I clicked on the front page https://blackberry.qnx.com/en which has a concise introduction "Real-Time OS and Software for Embedded Systems L…

Bad product, bad company, bad marketing. Consistent.

You'd be one of the first people I've seen that doesn't like QNX itself. Normally people complain about the licensing or RIM. What issues do you have?

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#72

Post by bitwize »

fulafel wrote: post #65
fauria wrote: post #60

In case you are wondering: QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system owned by BlackBerry, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. From https://www.sealevel.com/2023/01/02/what-is-qnx

The "unix-like" characterisation seems it might be be from the Wikipedia QNX article and repeated by a lot of web content. But it doesn't seem really accurate to me and it's not used by their own web site or documentation. It seems quite opposite to Unix in a lot of ways even though it has some API compatibility.

It's got a POSIX API layer, but it's about as "unix-like" as Haiku.

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#73

Post by bexsella »

I’ve had a lot of experience in developing on QNX over the years, and with each successive year, the call to migrate to Linux got stronger. The day to day developer experience is great, you can very easily setup a CMake toolchain and bypass the need for QNX’s Momentics, which if you’re just developing for QNX is something you will want to do. But, in my experience the driver support simply isn’t there, and that became painful. A fair few major board manufacturers treat QNX integration as a complete afterthought, and at a point you start to feel that this is directly related to RIM’s decision to shutdown source access to QNX. I’ve since left that company, but I imagine there is still a call to use Linux.

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#74

Post by brynet »

I don't have great expectations for this, we've been rug pulled before.

https://www.osnews.com/story/23565/qnx6-is-closed-source-onc...

They then killed the self-hosted QNX entirely, no downloadable .ISOs after 6.5. No working toolchain, so porting software became difficult, pkgsrc abandoned.

They are completely noncommittal, nothing short of actually open-sourcing it, MIT/BSD, would convince me otherwise.

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#75

Post by jauntywundrkind »

I wonder how much DBus (the Inter-Process-Communication (IPC) standard Linux desktops have been based around) is baked into QNX & instrumental to it! Maybe I can find out now?

https://ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Remote_Car_Hacking.pdf or https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/vehicle-cybersecurity-the-...

That was such a time. It's sad that it was a security panic, to me, because there was incredible promise there... All of the cars infotainment, windows, interior lighting, HVAC, all these things are just DBus services hosted on QNX? And I can just connect to my car & modify them, in some cases even over the air? QNX & DBus could have been a huge selling point, could have been such an awesome way to debundle the car from its infotainment. If only.

Really interested to see if DBus really does underpin much of QNX, or whether this was just a time & place. Seeing how monolithic versus networked QNX is in general would be fascinating; is there one or two QNX hosts & lots of devices, or so the story more distributed that that?

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#77

Post by sriram_sun »

Is there an eBPF equivalent for QNX? Also, with the real-time linux patch (which has been mainlined now), I'm able to run C++ ROS2 control loops @ 1ms down to even 250us on commodity off the shelf i3 and i5 hardware with dedicated cores.

I've worked on vxWorks, QNX and Linux and I found the pace of development using Linux the fastest.

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#79

Post by eikenberry »

NexRebular wrote: post #46
farseer wrote: post #37

With linux options in embedded space aplenty, who would want to move to a propriety os? QNX's big brother Vxworks has already been pushed out of most consumer embedded devices and is now limited to space probes and critical medical equipment. I just don't see a future for QNX anywhere.

Not everything has to be linux. It's good to have options for avoiding monoculturalization.

It's not a real option (to Linux) though at it is still governed by a non-free license.
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