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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

#201

Post by tdeck »

hinkley wrote: post #151
baby_souffle wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was worse than an NDA! You also had to start your application with a trip to a notary to get your ID confirmed. And if their signing servers were down…You couldn’t load had just compiled onto your own dev / test device. I loved using my blackberry but I hated developing against it. Bb10 was its own little adventure but had similar draconian dx

One of the dirty secrets of the mobile industry, particularly before Apple showed up and spoiled all the fun, was how many execs and chunks of the ethos were airlifted out of Ma Bell. The kind of moat-building we're seeing take over the internet over the last couple decades is something that mobile carriers already had in heaps. It was also common for carriers to extort very high fees from anyone selling apps on thei…

I remember getting some LG phone in maybe 2007 and being excited because I read you could write 3rd party apps and games for it. Then I tried reading the BREW developer docs and trying the emulator, which were both abysmal. Then I read that just to try an app on my phone I would need to pay hundreds of dollars (IIRC it was $400) to get it signed.

That totally killed my desire to develop for my flip phone.

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

#202

Post by throwaway313373 »

gosub100 wrote: post #123
parl_match wrote: post #118

Why would I use QNX for any project when RTOS Linux is mature? Why would I care? So you can rug-pull license changes? Should I use it because it's cute? It's academically interesting? Sure, I've used QNX in the past for those reasons. The next time I pick a soc for a project, and its associated bsp, I'm not going to look for QNX. I'm either going to use whatever freertos distro they include or install the android bui…

You would use it if you wanted to get a job doing RTOS dev and wanted to show you had some skin in the game.

I don't think that "skin in the game" means what you think it means.

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

#203

Post by throwaway313373 »

smallstepforman wrote: post #115
vundercind wrote: post #96

QNX and BeOS were the only operating systems I tried in the early '00s that could make old single-core mid-90s Pentiums feel excellent and snappy to use. Far, far better than any Windows version, or Linux. I assume it's mostly scheduler stuff and much better multimedia stacks, in both cases. I always hoped the operating systems of the future would feel more like that. Closest we've got is probably iOS and it cheats b…

BeOS was “pervasively” multithreaded, which in non marketing speak means the kernel did not have a giant lock (since it was designed as a many core system from day #1). Its contemporary OS’s at the time had a giant single lock. BeOS also had 750ms preemption interval (or was it 3ms, I dont remember) while Linux and Windows had 20ms, then later 10ms, so this is what you fealt. A couple of decades later and most OS’s m…

> BeOS also had 750ms preemption interval (or was it 3ms, I dont remember)

3ms vs almost a second is a pretty big difference...

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

#204

Post by BenjiWiebe »

inChargeOfIT wrote: post #28
ilhuadjkv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, http://127.1/ In the browser in the crackberry video what the....

little known fact: you can write shorthand for any ip address. It simply omits 0. Ie 127.0.0.1 (or 127.000.000.001). Try pinging it. `ping 127.1` 10.0.0.3 -> ping 10.3

And the shortest IP to ping, for a quick connectivity check: 1.1 (1.0.0.1 is cloudflare dns alternate address)

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

#205

Post by tcbawo »

Teever wrote: post #177
mwcampbell wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somebody really should write a microkernel like this in Rust. I wonder how far Redox's microkernel design is from what that comment describes.

A friend of mine is working on this OS: https://gitlab.com/uxrt

I see this was submitted to HN a couple times over the last few years and has not received any comments. Can you describe the goals and status of this project? Does it fit into any larger ecosystem? Is it a research project or intended for eventual mainstream adoption?

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

#206

Post by AstroJetson »

WillAdams wrote: post #124
JohnAtQNX wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're at something like 235 millions cars on the road today with QNX inside. The volume blows my mind. We're also hiding inside lots of healthcare products, industrial control systems, etc. There's lots of interesting key differences between something based on Linux, for example, and QNX. Worth digging into if you're interested in these things. My colleague wrote a short ebook and the intro has a good summary…

There is however also TRON: https://ethw.org/Milestones:TRON_Real-time_Operating_System_... which was demoed running on an 80186 with _multiple_ windows running videos w/o dropping a frame. Described as "The most installed operating system in the world": https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/the-most-popular-operatin... Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department viewed the Japanese plan to place it on all computers in the…

There is a micro kernel version that runs on RP2040 would that work for you?

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

#207

Post by ryukoposting »

gosub100 wrote: post #123
parl_match wrote: post #118

Why would I use QNX for any project when RTOS Linux is mature? Why would I care? So you can rug-pull license changes? Should I use it because it's cute? It's academically interesting? Sure, I've used QNX in the past for those reasons. The next time I pick a soc for a project, and its associated bsp, I'm not going to look for QNX. I'm either going to use whatever freertos distro they include or install the android bui…

You would use it if you wanted to get a job doing RTOS dev and wanted to show you had some skin in the game.

Maybe you would have used QNX as an engineer flex in 2012, but as an embedded firmware dev myself, I'd laugh if someone suggested we use QNX for anything. Besides the licensing issues... just why? It confers no imaginable benefit versus any one of dozens of alternatives. It's like if someone suggested I run Haiku on my work laptop.

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

#208

Post by WillAdams »

AstroJetson wrote: post #206
WillAdams wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is however also TRON: https://ethw.org/Milestones:TRON_Real-time_Operating_System_... which was demoed running on an 80186 with _multiple_ windows running videos w/o dropping a frame. Described as "The most installed operating system in the world": https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/the-most-popular-operatin... Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department viewed the Japanese plan to place it on all computers in the…

There is a micro kernel version that runs on RP2040 would that work for you?

Unfortunately, I want a desktop environment, so probably not.

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

#209

Post by mlyle »

vbezhenar wrote: post #200
scheme271 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Real time" is only good if you need guaranteed responsiveness within certain time limits. It can actually be suboptimal and slow you down if you don't need it and want to optimize other things like throughput.

Who needs throughput? Server software, but Linux is already dominant there and everyone's happy. For everything else, including desktop and mobile operating systems realtime sounds like a good idea.

Absolutely deterministic latency isn't a requirement for the desktop like it is for industrial control.

If 99% of the time performance is faster, and the remaining 1% of the time isn't that bad, most people will take the trade of higher average performance. If it's running the antilock braking in your car, that's pretty bad.

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

#210

Post by fjkdlsjflkds »

winocm wrote: post #194
karmakaze wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working as intended. If they don't want to share, then they can't benefit.

It's not so much that as there is the net-negative side effect of having people redo the same work over and over again at their day job or whatever. It horrifies me when I think about the number of hours of people's lives wasted on things like that. It applies to both sides of the argument, with organizations keeping things to themselves or others avoiding codebases for the inverse reason.

> It's not so much that as there is the net-negative side effect of having people redo the same work over and over again at their day job or whatever. It horrifies me when I think about the number of hours of people's lives wasted on things like that.

Given that this issue applies to all proprietary/non-opensource software, which is the overwhelming majority of software out there, you can hardly blame GPL3 for this fact of life.

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