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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

#171

Post by toyg »

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…

> as someone who has no clue what to expect from QNX

Apple doesn't have to explain on their homepage what they do. QNX, in some sectors, has been a very well-known brand for a few decades, which is probably why their marketing material is stuck in that mode.

The obvious fact though, as your comment demonstrates, they're now just another nobody.

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

#173

Post by scheme271 »

stevesimmons wrote: post #91
Tomte wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For everyone else, your QNX comment from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640

As someone who knows only that QNX is a RTOS and that "real time" is good in some vague hand-wavy way, I found this 2015 comment a very succinct, concrete and illuminating description of one aspect of QNX's architecture that makes it properly real-time. So thank you very much for the link.

"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.

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

JohnAtQNX wrote: post #109
justin66 wrote: post #101

@JohnAtQNX the way to put the rug-pulling concerns to bed is to license all the source code under the ISC License, BSD 2-clause License, or MIT License. This would certainly have an impact once that was done. Of course I cannot speak to what that would do to your software business...

I hear it loud and clear. We're certainly in the early days of this initiative, but as things progress I'll make sure to bring up source code licensing as a community concern.

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by gerdesj »

MisterTea wrote: post #140
eikenberry wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good libre real-time OS you would recommend over it?

RTEMS is one and there is also eCOS. RTEMS has flown in space a few times so it is proven. Forgot to mention: the neat part of RTEMS is it allows one to sort of turn a Unix program into a bare metal program.

Why do RTEMS and eCOS trump, say, Linux? Linux on a RPi has also famously flown (really!) in space.

It's all very well asserting something but a bit more chat would be nice.

I'm not sure what "turn a Unix program into a bare metal program." means.

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

#176

Post by tcbawo »

Tomte wrote: post #62
Animats wrote: post #45

If only you could believe them. QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again. Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for th…

For everyone else, your QNX comment from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640

Thank you for adding that link. What I find particularly remarkable is that the author of that comment is John Nagle himself (of Nagle’s Algorithm fame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm).

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

#177

Post by Teever »

mwcampbell wrote: post #130
Tomte wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For everyone else, your QNX comment from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640

> 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

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

#178

Post by fragmede »

gerdesj wrote: post #175
MisterTea wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTEMS is one and there is also eCOS. RTEMS has flown in space a few times so it is proven. Forgot to mention: the neat part of RTEMS is it allows one to sort of turn a Unix program into a bare metal program.

Why do RTEMS and eCOS trump, say, Linux? Linux on a RPi has also famously flown (really!) in space. It's all very well asserting something but a bit more chat would be nice. I'm not sure what "turn a Unix program into a bare metal program." means.

Say all your program does is read some sensors via gpio, save those readings in ram, do a bit of math on that state, then set some other gpio pins, and that's all the entire system does. when it turns on, it should jump right into doing that and nothing else.

It may be easier to write that on a full sized Linux system, but come time to deploy it, all that Linux code that isn't being used is a liability for bugs and unexpected behavior to crop up. One approach is to slim down Linux to avoid that (eg removing systemd, esp for systems that don't have enough ram to run it), but another approach would be to just use something less complicated than Linux. It would suck to get to space only to find that something had messed up permissions on the gpio pins again so your satellite didn't deploy and now you've wasted a launch. If there's no permissions system to mess up, that can't go wrong.

As far as bare metal, I presume it means to port a Unix program which has all sorts of assumptions about running on a Unix operating system, to an OS that's not one, with simplified models for a lot of things, and for the system to reliably run that program on boot and not do anything unecessary. Like run cups.

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

#179

Post by chungy »

deathanatos wrote: post #34
ilhuadjkv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a particularly cursed form of writing IPv4 addresses: > A popular implementation of IP networking, originating in 4.2BSD, contains a function inet_aton() for converting IP addresses in character string representation to internal binary storage. In addition to the basic four-decimals format and 32-bit numbers, it also supported intermediate syntax forms of octet.24bits (e.g. 10.1234567; for Class A addresses) and…

I'm not sure it's "cursed", I find it useful shorthand and use it frequently.

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

#180

Post by nickpsecurity »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #15

What would be a good hobbyist project to learn QNX?

Cash register that takes input, does calculations, display updates, and syncs with a database for inventory and pricing. It’s not hard to build a simple one. Make sure you use decimal, not floats, to avoid weird errors.

What would be QNX specific would be making sure the main app is always responsive to user input. That the network, DB, or other things don’t slow it down. That might be done by scheduling dedicated time for both input and the main loop. Non-blocking I/O so main loop can check the progress of other things. Maybe a monitor in there watching for freezes.

If any component freezes, have it restart and get new/updated state. If that works, next version is a two-board, highly-available system with QNX’s networked IPC.

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