Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blackberry.qnx.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 380 posts

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

#291

Post by pjmlp »

talldayo wrote: post #250
mikepurvis wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. LLVM exists because GCC is GPL; that's a feature not a bug.

I don't even understand how you can point to LLVM as an example of this failing. GCC is still alive and well, and perfectly suited for the task it was always intended to fill. People that wanted a commercial C compiler always had the option to purchase one at-cost, GCC was intended as an alternative to that process, not the alternative. It may be hard to remember, but less than 50 years ago squabbles over compiler li…

Also after LLVM came to be, GCC gained on its official collection Go, D, and Modula-2 frontends.

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

#292

Post by chrsw »

nrclark wrote: post #90

@JohnAtQNX can you remove the "everybody needs an account" restriction from your website downloads, and also remove the license mechanism from qcc? That would go a long way towards encouraging hobbyists to try it out. Your money comes from high-volume licensing deals, where you presumably get a per-unit license fee. That revenue stream is jeopardized by pissing off the CI/CD teams that have to support QNX product lin…

Exactly. I'm more likely to go somewhere else with less friction.

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

#293

Post by vbezhenar »

caskstrength wrote: post #266
vbezhenar wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> For everything else, including desktop and mobile operating systems realtime sounds like a good idea. Why on earth would you need real time on desktop? Every time the topic is discussed on internet bunch of confused people chime in with this sentiment that doesn't make much sense. "RTOS" is not some magic that somehow makes everything on your desktop fast. All it would do in reality is make everything slower for 99…

I've read many opinions of those who used QNX on desktop in the past, that it felt much more "snappy" compared to other systems.

Desktop definitely has real time tasks. Any animation is real time task. When I'm listening to music, it's real time task. macOS sound interrupts for a short time, when something hardware-related happens, so it's not pleasant experience. You might argue that user can tolerate those interruptions, but for me those are just bugs.

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

#294

Post by Y_Y »

pjmlp wrote: post #289
Y_Y wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Fair enough. I guess you're talking about microcontrollers rather than lightweight CPUs, at least in my experience it's still standard to use GCC on the sort of dinky ARM-based devices my company produces.

I'll note that GPL never says anything about upstreaming. It can certainly make life easier if you want to keep your patches up to date and hand off maintenance responsibility, but it suffices to make a written offer of source code under the same license (on a conventional medium) to your customers to comply with any GPL version. You're never obliged to upstream or even publish your code.

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

#295

Post by 0x0203 »

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.

I would argue that in many ways (that vary from project to project) the duplicated efforts are a good thing overall. Now, instead of having one single group or person working on a particular topic, there are many and the knowledge, learning, experience, and expertise that comes from that isn't locked up with only a select few. That can be applied in more areas, used for more things, or carried into other endeavors. It also hedges against all that expertise being lost if the few experts of the original project abandon it for whatever reason.

I don't see all the efforts that go into *BSD, Windows, macOS, etc... as being wasted just because Linux is available, nor would I consider the effort to try something completely new in os/kernel design that starts from a clean slate a waste, even if it doesn't end up becoming wildly popular. Not everyone who has the capacity to work on a duplicate effort would be able to contribute to the original, and the original will never be able to perfectly meet the goals/needs of everyone.

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

#298

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #75

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 o…

Dbus is a (not very good) userland message bus. QNX is a realtime kernel. I don't really understand what you mean by:

> Really interested to see if DBus really does underpin much of QNX, or whether this was just a time & place.

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

#299

Post by eitland »

bregma wrote: post #285
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 major upgraded was landed recently: https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/10/linux-6-12-real-time/

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

#300

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #148
xcrunner529 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t doubt this but it’s worth noting that I believe spacex uses Linux as their RTOS.

SpaceX can afford that by their _very_ resilient design and accepting, even anticipating failure.

If your design is resilient to missing deadlines, you don't need a RTOS and the question becomes moot.
Post reply on HN