will this work with liteX? fascinating project
Hmm.. how liteX is related to the QNX-inspired OS with selectable kernels? :)
QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
#22Do you have any plans (maybe in the far future) to re-implement the Photon microGUI system? Just asking because for me, that's half of what made QNX so great back in the day. Even today I keep raving about that 1.44MB demo floppy, about how polished, performant and efficient Photon was.
I wonder if we couldn't just use LLMs to completely reverse engineer a QNX 4.25 demo image into usable source code. Possibly translate it directly into rust code.
Bun had it easier in many ways, given that they're based on a well-documented public API surface & have the node.js test suite etc.
In the case of QNX I'm guessing it might help to find a way to intercept the message passing of running QNX instances in order to use it as a test harness while reverse engineering all the components.
Re: QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
#23Do you have any plans (maybe in the far future) to re-implement the Photon microGUI system? Just asking because for me, that's half of what made QNX so great back in the day. Even today I keep raving about that 1.44MB demo floppy, about how polished, performant and efficient Photon was.
I contacted the QNX community relations manager a little time ago and (if I remember correctly) they said they weren't going to release any of the microGUI source as they wanted the community to focus on their current projects. Very saddening that all that useful historical source code is being left to rot.
Re: QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
#24Re: QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
#25Do you have any plans (maybe in the far future) to re-implement the Photon microGUI system? Just asking because for me, that's half of what made QNX so great back in the day. Even today I keep raving about that 1.44MB demo floppy, about how polished, performant and efficient Photon was.
I wonder if we couldn't just use LLMs to completely reverse engineer a QNX 4.25 demo image into usable source code. Possibly translate it directly into rust code. Bun had it easier in many ways, given that they're based on a well-documented public API surface & have the node.js test suite etc. In the case of QNX I'm guessing it might help to find a way to intercept the message passing of running QNX instances in orde…
I reckon it should be feasible - especially if you start with the code in the 1.44MB demo disk. If you exclude the kernel, the network stack, the drivers and all the other apps, the binaries for Photon itself should be in kilobytes. Far more complex projects have been decompiled with LLMs.
Re: QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm.. how liteX is related to the QNX-inspired OS with selectable kernels? :)
Use litex to define/build a riscv soc-on-fpga, boot qsoe instead of Linux on said fpga?
Thanks for the clarification! Till today I didn't know you can build a 64-bit RISC-V CPU with LiteX. Cool!
The only problem (for me) is the availability of suitable hardware to implement it :) The only FPGA board I got is GateMate EVB-A1.
Re: QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use litex to define/build a riscv soc-on-fpga, boot qsoe instead of Linux on said fpga?
Thanks for the clarification! Till today I didn't know you can build a 64-bit RISC-V CPU with LiteX. Cool! The only problem (for me) is the availability of suitable hardware to implement it :) The only FPGA board I got is GateMate EVB-A1.
Where are you based, I can get you something beefier?
I got a Tang Primer for one of my own projects recently.
Re: QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
#28[dead]
Re: QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
#29Re: QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture
#30To all experts in video cards reading this: Do you know, how to initialize a NVidia card in the RISC-V system (such as Unmatched or Polarfire) to the basic VGA mode 3 (text mode, 80x25)? :) I really wanted to get the Real Console for QSOE, but so far all my efforts to run video BIOS (via U-Boot's bios_emulator) are not successful...
Depending how recent the card is, you might need to implement UEFI & GOP instead. Might be better approach to read any open source driver code on Linux or BSD to find out how to get basic framebuffer
Exactly. After days of unsuccessful VideoBIOS bring-up (via U-Boot's emulator), I gave up, and implemented exactly what you suggested: graphics mode, using of course parts of nouveau. Claude Code is smart in extracting information.
And it worked!! Now I have the picture on the monitor when U-Boot starts. The only one drawback: it takes 30..40 seconds between the moment of machine-power-on and the picture on the screen.