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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

#281

Post by ahoka »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #18

My previous company, which made high-availability (Active/Standby) routers for mobile networks, used QNX as the OS. I remain impressed by its capabilities. My memory is rusty, but we ran QNX on the control-plane processors, and it natively allowed launching processes on remote processors over the internal network of the router. That is: their low-level IPC was IP-capable. QNX's IPC was essential for our HA failover f…

I also worked on routes for mobile networks. Everything ran Linux, especially the control plane. Line cards were also linux, but the only task they had to do is to program the ASICS as the control plane told them to do. None of those features are relevant, you could do the IPC over HTTP or whatever you wanted.

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

#282

Post by Havoc »

krapp wrote: post #191
Havoc wrote: post #190

For the love of god put what the thing is into the first sentence. Still have no idea wth qnx is

If you don't already know, or can't even be bothered to read their linked site, you probably aren't the target audience.

> can't even be bothered to read their linked site, you probably aren't the target audience.

People who are not the audience need to read it to determine that they don’t need to read it because they’re not the target audience? That’s your solution over them integrating “QNX is an embedded Os” into their opening paragraph?

What a strange response to a rather simple hey could you be clearer request

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

#283

Post by rbanffy »

stackghost wrote: post #196
rbanffy wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bb10 was its own little adventure but had similar draconian dx I did some development for it but the bureaucracy killed my will to do more. It was a great phone OS though. The real time nature makes even modest hardware responsive.

The BB10-powered Passport was my favorite device

I still want one. Can’t find any.

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

#284

Post by workfromspace »

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…

As someone also have used BeOS and OS/2 Warp, I miss the snappiness of old systems. (I never got my hands on QNX)

What OS nowadays is the closest to that snappiness? Haiku OS? (I'm a happy M1 Macbook user, but it sometimes feel note nough.)

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

#285

Post by bregma »

graymatters wrote: post #242

QNX is squeezed from above by Linux, especially as real time patches have finally been fully accepted. And from below by FreeRTOS and Zephyr. Current attempt to open source is a desperate move by QNX as their market share is disappearing. Why would anyone in their right mind step on the same landmine, called QNX, which already pulled a rug from under the developers feet once? Absolutely no trust in QNX ecosystem. Sav…

There are not any real time patches for Linux: there's only the low-latency kernel. Low-latency and realtime are different things. A lot of the time the two can appear superficially similar, until they don't and your airplane falls out of they sky.

The realtime executives are not operating systems. Executives and operating systems are two different things.

QNX is a realtime operating system. It addresses the niche of a realtime operating system that isn't being met by anything else out there, and has been doing so for 40 years, even if free versions for hobbyists haven't been available for many of those years. It's not about market share since that's always been there. It's about mindshare and given the comments here, that's obviously missing.

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

#286

Post by bregma »

fulafel wrote: post #235
bregma wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it seem like the opposite? It's POSIX.

Check out eg this paper about the OS: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~voelker/cse221/papers/qnx-paper92.p... Yes it has some source-level Unix compatible app-facing interfaces, but we don't call the Steam OS/Deck a Windows-like either. (eg Windows NT was also POSIX certified)

I'd definitely call the Steam Deck unix-like, although GNU/Linux is less POSIX-conformant than QNX is.

Source-level and command-level compatibility is what makes something "unix-like". Paying a hefty annual license fee to the Open Group is what makes your OS "Unix". I don't believe there is any benefit to BlackBerry paying such a fee so they can slap their logo on their web site since the US DoD is not a target market for them.

Nevertheless, arguing that something is not "unix-like" just because it's very much like Unix is, well, odd.

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

#287

Post by dholm »

xp84 wrote: post #159
KerrAvon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS has very strict process/resource management because it wants to preserve both available RAM (for responsiveness) and your battery life. I wouldn't call it cheating (even in jest); it's a very deliberately and carefully designed feature of the OS.

Sure, and that's fair, but to me the "cheating" is more about how it is limited to only certain types of computing. On a Mac, or indeed any non-Apple OS since Windows 3.1, you've been able to for instance, start a long-running, resource-intensive process like encoding a video, minimize that window, and open say, Minesweeper or read a text file for an hour, all knowing that the OS wouldn't dare interfere with your bac…

This was most certainly not the case when using CD burners in windows 9x. I remember my friend being afraid of even moving the mouse while burning a CD.

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

#289

Post by pjmlp »

Y_Y wrote: post #278
baq wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gcc was specifically designed to not have many reusable parts to avoid people ripping them out. modularity only happened after LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch.

> LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch I don't know how you can eat GCC's lunch. I feel like in this analogy GCC eats from a communal trough and is very happy to share. A company that sells licenses can lose customers, the GNU project just wants the world to benefit. GCC is still ubiquitous and has plenty of developers and mindshare, what more could they want?

Basically most of the embedded folks that used GCC forks are now on clang, and if in the old days they were breaching GPL, nowadays they are fully compilant, so not upstreaming is not even a legal issue any longer.

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

#290

Post by ice3 »

moefh wrote: post #106
jandrese wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 at least sensibly has a different delimiter for when you are eliding zeros.

It's not really about eliding zeros, though. It's kind of a cursed thing: x -> x3.x2.x1.x0 x.y -> x.y2.y1.y0 x.y.z -> x. y.z1.z0 x.y.z.w -> x. y. z. w Where x0 is the 8 least significant bits of x, x1 is the next 8 higher bits, and so on. The "zeros" happen when the last number is smaller than 256 (or 65536, etc.), but it doesn't have to be. For example 10.258 is a valid way to write an IPv4 address, it's the same as…

Here's a cursed way of writing an ip address: 0xA.024.7720 where 0xA is hex, 024 is octal and last 2 octets are written as a decimal number
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