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The Rise Of QNX 163

Posted by timothy from the we-need-an-o.s.-called-"dough" dept.
SirTimbly writes about QNX: "This little OS is making a big stir lately with big companies. The QNX operating system (pronounced Q-nux) has been rumored lately to be in favor of such companies as CISCO and Palm. This is an embedded OS currently used in Netpliance's i-Opener; it was developed by 3Com and is being used in their latest Internet appliance as well. Read more about this non open-source OS in a ZDNet story here."

QNX might not be new, but SirTimbly is right about it making a stir. Max von H. writes: "Audrey, the household net appliance from 3Com/ergo has been officially released, and there's even an official site on which you can smile at the design. The beast runs QNX/Neutrino, as stated in this ZDNet story. The sweet thing is it can sync with two PalmOS devices, which can make a geek couple's life much easier without having to fumble with a real PC. Say what you want, but Audrey could possibly be successful since anybody can use it, and 3Com has shown a simple system rules when it comes to do simple things."

And no mention of QNX is complete without a reference to the QNX demo disk, which packs a pretty amazing set of features onto a floppy. Here too, it's free, but not Free.
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The Rise Of QNX More

The Rise Of QNX

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  • I wanna bend you over and shove a PoopyMoose up your ass little boy.
  • X is the reason.

    I still dream that something will replace X but it is looking hopeless now...

  • Re:The coolest things about QNX (Score:3)

    by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @07:34AM (#690912) Homepage
    "It's also really efficiently written, and almost completely modular (as opposed to Linux' monolithic-plus-kitchen-sink approach)."

    I don't suppose you've ever used Linux, since lsmod, rmmod, insmod, depmod, modprobe are all parts of the wonderful world of mapping things dynamically into kernele space. With it, I can have hot plug PCMCIA, USB, and other devices without having to have this monolitihic kernel you decry. There's even a Microkernel Linux [mklinux.org] which adds the features that the HURD and QNX have, that Linux doesn't.

    QNX is targetted at embedded devices. That tight focus lets it get away with not having support for 64gb of ram, scaling to 8-way SMP, NUMA, swap space, implementation of device drivers for PC and non-PC hardware of all kinds, and other requirements of being a kernel that can be embedded [uclinux.org] in devices lacking a memory controller, to massive SMP systems [slashdot.org], to computing clusters [scyld.com].

    "QNX is much more suitable for PDAs and otehr small systems than is Linux."
    Ever heard the phrase "jack of all trades, master of none?" Linux is the swiss-army knife kernel. It may not be as good for skinning as a proper hunting knife, but it also has a saw, a can opener, a magnifying glass, and many other useful tools that you might need some day. Think about it.

    --
  • Here is the contents of my 1.0 megabyte winsfx.exe file. I used it to run windows on a 386sx-16 with 4MB of ram with no harddrive. I used over two megs for a ramdisk. Still had plenty left. Youll note this includes Winsock,Telnet client,FTP client,POP mail client, IRC client, Program manager, Sound blaster support, Notepad, Tetris, MasterMind, Clock, Several fonts, and a highspeed com driver. This is a piece work of windows 3.0,3.1,3.11 :-)

    HOSTS 99 06-17-98 10:15p HOSTS
    PROTOCOL 441 10-07-94 5:25p PROTOCOL
    SERVICES 2,665 06-13-95 1:14p SERVICES
    WIN BAT 65 06-26-98 6:45p WIN.BAT
    BYE CMD 930 05-09-98 8:22p BYE.CMD
    LOGIN CMD 3,531 06-26-98 6:55p LOGIN.CMD
    COMMAND COM 54,619 05-20-98 7:23p COMMAND.COM
    REG DAT 352 06-26-98 6:12p REG.DAT
    WINSOCK DLL 159,744 07-24-95 5:09p WINSOCK.DLL
    SHELL DLL 40,944 11-01-93 3:11a SHELL.DLL
    TOOLHELP DLL 14,128 11-01-93 3:11a TOOLHELP.DLL
    CTL3DV2 DLL 27,200 08-09-96 2:30a CTL3DV2.DLL
    COMMDLG DLL 97,936 11-01-93 3:11a COMMDLG.DLL
    SYSTEM DRV 2,304 11-01-93 3:11a SYSTEM.DRV
    TIMER DRV 4,192 05-22-98 11:55p TIMER.DRV
    VGA DRV 73,200 11-01-93 3:11a VGA.DRV
    LMOUSE DRV 12,928 11-01-93 3:11a LMOUSE.DRV
    SB20SND DRV 16,176 02-16-93 12:38p SB20SND.DRV
    SBFM DRV 12,752 05-19-92 2:10p SBFM.DRV
    SOUND DRV 3,440 11-01-93 3:11a SOUND.DRV
    TWCOMM DRV 11,760 09-16-94 12:16p TWCOMM.DRV
    KEYBOARD DRV 7,568 11-01-93 3:11a KEYBOARD.DRV
    NOTEPAD EXE 31,936 05-01-90 3:00a NOTEPAD.EXE
    TELNET EXE 57,216 03-31-98 6:54p TELNET.EXE
    TCPMAN EXE 144,384 07-24-95 5:09p TCPMAN.EXE
    TASKMAN EXE 3,744 05-22-98 9:46p TASKMAN.EXE
    WINIRC EXE 96,768 03-16-95 9:01p WINIRC.EXE
    FTP EXE 53,248 06-30-95 2:24a FTP.EXE
    CLOCK EXE 16,416 05-22-98 9:45p CLOCK.EXE
    TETRIS EXE 40,000 06-22-98 12:58a TETRIS.EXE
    PROGMAN EXE 115,312 11-01-93 3:11a PROGMAN.EXE
    DOSX EXE 32,682 11-01-93 3:11a DOSX.EXE
    GDI EXE 220,800 11-01-93 3:11a GDI.EXE
    KRNL386 EXE 76,400 11-01-93 3:11a KRNL386.EXE
    USER EXE 264,096 01-07-98 8:51p USER.EXE
    MRMIND EXE 20,464 06-22-98 1:08a MRMIND.EXE
    LABPOP EXE 298,128 02-09-96 9:45a LABPOP.EXE
    SERIFE FON 57,936 11-01-93 3:11a SERIFE.FON
    SSERIFE FON 64,544 11-01-93 3:11a SSERIFE.FON
    VGAFIX FON 5,360 11-01-93 3:11a VGAFIX.FON
    VGAOEM FON 5,168 11-01-93 3:11a VGAOEM.FON
    VGASYS FON 7,280 11-01-93 3:11a VGASYS.FON
    COUR FOT 1,318 04-04-98 2:04a COUR.FOT
    MAIN GRP 6,973 06-26-98 7:12p MAIN.GRP
    SYSTEM INI 1,143 06-26-98 6:25p SYSTEM.INI
    WINIRC INI 157 06-26-98 7:01p WINIRC.INI
    CLOCK INI 90 06-26-98 6:38p CLOCK.INI
    WIN INI 3,861 06-26-98 6:37p WIN.INI
    TRUMPWSK INI 1,066 06-26-98 7:02p TRUMPWSK.INI
    PROGMAN INI 122 06-26-98 7:12p PROGMAN.INI
  • qnx is a poor substitute for an OS let me tell you why: 1. drivers? what drivers. Hardware support is poor at best 2. QNX will not let you know how to interact with thier software. 3. it is not Unix it may feel like it at first but is very waterd down.
  • I did my first programming with QNX on ICON computers. Does anybody else remember using Alice Pascal or WATFILE, or Word Perfect under the enmulated DOS shell? Last the big thing was they QNX was to run the Amiga, when the QNX was at the University of Waterloo they gave hints to that, of course nothing happened.
  • Incidentally, has anyone ever mangaged to get a bootable QNX + firewall capability onto a 16MB Sandisk?

    Anyone who has probably knows why I'm interested.

    Why, so you can use your digital camera as a firewall? I guess since Doom has been ported to Digita, this would be a logical next step. Plug a USB hub and two USB NICs into the camera's USB port, and away you go!

    It would be an excellent development environment... making snapshots would be a piece of cake!

    --
  • Although most of the people here are familiar with the use of Linux in various forms in real-time and embedded applications, there are a number of other free real-time alternatives. eCos has been mentioned but RTEMS is the oldest free RTOS. It has been ported to about a dozen CPU families, has TCP/IP, pSOS+ compatability, POSIX threads, ITRON, etc, etc. The source is there, GPL'ed, and there are prebuilt toolsets. See http://www.oarcorp.com/RTEMS. It is also important to remember that real-time and embedded systems come in many shapes and sizes. Most embedded systems are quite small and very cost-conscious. Embedded a hard drive or even a flash disk is out of the question. Consider your cell phone, pager, fuel injection system, etc. Those are really quite specific and limited hardware targets where price is king.
  • But they got Quake III! It's not fair! (*whine*)
    Ah well, I guess you have to have something to do when you get bored in a reactor or dam. :)

    -lx

  • If you had taken the time to read, you would have noticed that I was responding to a guy promoting XINU, whose homepage has *not* been updated in 2 years.

    Ranessin
  • It never really fails to amaze me how many people totally miss sites like Lineo [lineo.com] They make Embedix and several other cool versions of Linux such as realtime Linux.

    I am a huge BSD fan myself but people almost always never even give Lineo a second glance. They did a whole lot of very cool things to get Linux embedded.

    They use A reduced libc (greatly;), Ash for the shell

    The kernel is tightened up and is much smaller.

    It comes with two graphics drawing utilities that are all text based for doing any kind of graphics stuff.

    For embedded apps I do not believe Lineo is as good as QNX this is absed on my limited experience with the capabilities of the two OS'

    Anyhow :)

    Jeremy
  • I well and truly remember the ICONS... horrible beasts they were, but they got me hooked on the concept of true multi-user systems. When I was in grade 11 or so, they started changing them all out for PCs (IBM PS/2 model 25 and 30) and we lost the multiuser any terminal any time stuff. It wasn't until going to university and rediscovering multiuser through Ultrix that I was again in a "happy place". The ICONs were fabulously ahead of their time, however, as other posters have noted, the training for the teachers wasn't there... I remember helping the (nominally) gym teacher get through the manual, trying to explain to him why the administrative user should be called "root" and why he can't change it to "tree" - that's about age 14 or so. And then I found Linux (0.99pre14 or so - ahhh slackware) and the rest is history - strangely - macOS on desktop and Linux on all but two of the servers.

    M

  • There just isn't that much left to dazzle us with.

    How about something on the order of a 10uS* hard realtime latency? Or a microkernel architecture which blows away kernel modules?

    Don't get me wrong; I'm a big Linux fan, but RTLinux (and the various other realtime variants) don't hold a candle to what QNX can do in that arena. QNX is x86 only though, and the various uClinuxes are for tons of different processors, much cheaper processors.

    * - I believe this is the number. I don't think I'm far off with this number if it is wrong.

  • Some factual errors.... (Score:5)

    by iCEBaLM ( 34905 ) on Thursday October 19, 2000 @09:35PM (#690923)
    Firstly, QNX is pronounced Queue-nicks, not Queue-nucks.

    Secondly, it was developed at the University of Waterloo [uwaterloo.ca] in Ontario, Canada and then spun off into a company.

    Thirdly, it is not *just* an embedded OS, its most prominant use (atleast to Ontario and Quebec elemenrtary and secondary school students some 10 years ago) was on the PC powering that evil Unisys [unisys.com] companies line of diskless 80186 based network computers called the Icon of which our schools had ungodly amounts of. QNX is also used quite extensively in the Canadian Armed Forces and can be used as a desktop OS.

    -- iCEBaLM
  • My friend works at a company who is leaving QNX because of its shortcomings. The company they're moving to says many people are leaving in favor of them or in favor of linux. Why? QNX gets poor performance overall and is a pain in the ass to program. It's posix compliant, but when porting things, or working with the OS, it's a royal pain in the ass. (I attempted to help him port BitchX and some random other tools once)

    For reference though, they have two different OSes, QNX (the one the demo disk and the i-opener are based on), and Nuetrino.

    Linux and the BSDs are much more capable, as are several other IA OSes including WindRiver and BeIA. (BeIA has actually been chosen for several next generation web appliances already and was demonstrated in Whirpools refigerators with the webpad).
  • What's DND? Dungeons and Dragons? I think NetHack is available for QNX RTP.

    If you mean Drag and Drop, it does have it. At least, it's documented in the Photon programmer's manual; so if it isn't there right now, it's coming soon.


  • Tim, at first I didn't get it, but now I see how clever you really are!

    "Mmm... DoughNIX!"

    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • These are the words you can read in one of the include in QNX RTP: #/usr/include/sys/asound.h ... -------------------------------------------------- * THIS FILE IS COMPLETELY UNENCUMBERED BY THE GPL VIRUS, AS IT WAS DEVELOPED * IN A "CLEAN-ROOM" FASHION WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE CONTENTS OF THE GPL-VERSION * OF THE "asound.h" FILE, APART FROM ACCESS TO WWW.ALSA-PROJECT.ORG WHICH DOES * NOT CONTAIN A GPL. -- Robert Krten, PARSE Software Devices, May 5, 2000. -------------------------------------------------- They should learn about gpl'd soft instead of copying them (and by the way creating bugs) (it looks like how MS could have done...)
  • Obligiatory Berlin [berlin-consortium.org] link.
  • I have not done any benchmarking on this, but I would presume running a distributed.net client under QNX would be an excellent way to get maximum use of your processors time.
  • That it supports modules doesn't mean it's modular. And, when was the last time you ran a driver in user space, had it crash, and restarted it without taking your system down for reboot?

    ________________________________________
  • I am writing this from the QNX demo right now. it took about 15 minutes to get it going from scratch, including downloading it.

    From the Package Mgr, I am currently downloading perl, pine, the quake3 engine and dozens of other *nixy GNU stuff that abounds.

    My screen resolution is at 1280x1024 32bit, and the text and gui elements are amazingly crisp and tight. I didn't have to do any configuring other than choosing a resolution and color depth.

    I was able to browse directly to a fat32 partition and play an mp3 within 30 seconds of gui bootup. It didn't detect my usb mouse though it is running a usb enumerator. I do have crappy usb on this mobo thouhg, so mileage may vary. this is the sweetest thing I'VE EVER SEEN.

    :)Fudboy


  • I love to play with QNX and such...But it's wonderful windowing interface is always a sad reminder of how slow/bad X really is in *nix. And *nix serves as a reminder of how bad hardware support is in QNX (or BeOs for that matter). I am left with the same issue I have with the political candidates...I like 50% of what each one says, and deplore the other 50%.

  • It started on DEC 11s, then X86, and recently PowerPC I believe.

  • reason it IS making inroads is because it is free

    No it isn't, at least not for commercial applications. It's a free eval and to dink around with, which is good enough for me.

    Even in the commercial aspect it is a lot freer than most alternatives because it is royalty free, which is a big bonus.

  • Actually, you don't have to manually swap, but you do need to manually turn on swap for each application.
  • Word Perfect under the enmulated DOS shell

    Yeah, and the kicker was that with the ICON2's doing DOS emulation, a Ctrl-Z at the right time would kick you out to a QNX command prompt with fairly high priveledges. Resulted in my first attempts at cracking (or at least it exercised my exploratory nature).

  • Actually, I think it's Canadian... (Score:3)

    by Ami Ganguli ( 921 ) on Thursday October 19, 2000 @08:39PM (#690937) Homepage

    I used QNX about twelve years ago. It used to power an educational computer called the Icon. It was actually a decent Unix-like system.

    Anyway, it's definately not developed by 3COM. I think the real developer was Quantum Systems in Waterloo Ontario Canada.

  • would you care to expound on that?

  • If they've added new drivers, I think that's worthy of updating the homepage :-)

    Ranessin

  • Whoops. I just checked www.qnx.com. Looks like they're in Kanata Ontario and they're called QNX Software Systems Ltd.

  • powering that evil Unisys companies line of diskless 80186 based network computers called the Icon

    I've got a couple of them I'd like to hack on. When I ripped it apart I noticed the 80186 and the token ring-ish network and whatnot but I've been totally unsuccessful in getting schematics or i/o maps of the damn things. Unisys doesn't acknowledge they exist.

    Does anyone have any information on them?

  • Umm... (Score:4)

    by infinitewaitstate ( 229560 ) <{infinitewaitstate} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday October 19, 2000 @08:43PM (#690942)
    Did you actually read the article?

    QNX was NOT developped by 3com, and I quote: &The Ontario, Canada-based company was founded 20 years ago as a real-time operating system vendor."

    At least get you facts straight and make it look like you actually read and understood the article before you post.

  • For smp in QNX RtP check out http://staff.qnx.com/~cdm/smp/ [qnx.com]. QNX Neutrino is the OS used for the QNX RtP (the "desktop" qnx). And QNX 4 is the os used for embedded applications (can probably be used as a desktop os aswell).

    Check out http://www.qnxstart.com [qnxstart.com] for lots more qnx stuff and downloads.
  • The recent launch of QNX RtP is certainly a change in that attitude.
  • Incidentally, has anyone ever mangaged to get a bootable QNX + firewall capability onto a 16MB Sandisk?

    Anyone who has probably knows why I'm interested.

  • `Nother thing about the older embedded OSes such as RTEMS is that they started out on processors without memory management. Now MM is great, giving you the ability to protect tasks from each other. But good old ROM gives you write protect on your code, and MM harware takes up a fair amount of chip real estate and slows things done a bit - more important a few years ago then today, but still can be a consideration on smaller products.

    Yet another thing is that the older embedded OSes were multi-thread, not multi-process. Again plus and minus, thread context switch is usually noticebly fast than process context switch. I've seen a number of programmers that learned in the DEC OS or Unix environment get tripped up in just-multi-thread embedded jobs, forgetting that all tasks share global variables and system resources.

    And a fully linked OS+application tends to come up much faster than a "bootable" OS. Most people would be annoyed if their TV, microwave, or cell phone took as long to boot as their desktop *NIX - MSWindows isn't even in the same state much less the ballpark.

  • QNX (pronounced Cue-nix, rhymes with Unix)

    does it have native support for the cue cat?

  • Re:gave it a try, not horribly impressed (Score:4)

    by erotus ( 209727 ) on Thursday October 19, 2000 @09:49PM (#690948)
    I also gave it a try. I downloaded the ISO image, burned it, booted it, installed it, and I must say - the install was flawless. The photon microgui is not X-based and is very fast. The OS itself is also very fast. I may use the floppy demo to setup an internet terminal on my LAN. I have to agree with you regarding the confusing file system layout.

    You mentioned BeOS only now getting support from vendors and this is in fact mentioned on benews.com or one of the other beos sites. I am impressed with qnx overall as it has been a good embedded OS for many years now. It probably has more viability controlling robots in a high tech assembly plant than as a full blown desktop OS though. We'll just have to wait and see what comes of it.
  • Or worse, pronounce it as kwai-nucks.

    HA HA ...HA

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

  • The first GUI was called "Ambiance", it was rather primitive, and allowed you to escape to a QNX shell prompt if you pressed the right set of keys at login. :)

    The second was called "Icon Look" which was a prettier version, a little more secure and powerful.

    I remember playing hours and hours of many games on those things, the cargo ship trader game, money market stock style game, and of course all our favorite was the robot game where you build a course and a robot and ran him around the course hoping to break him, but they removed that one for some reason....

    -- iCEBaLM
  • int result = 0;
    int[] bits = {1,0,1,0,0,1,1,0,1,0};
    for (int i = 0; ibits.length; i++)
    {
    result = 1;
    result += bits[i];
    }
    cout result;

    Aieeeeee! he's the antichrist!

  • Qnx Neutrino supports Mips, PowerPC, x86 and I heard about Arm/StrongArm support but haven't seen much about it. Their latest releases are x86 only but I hope they don't completely drop the other architechtures for Qnx RTP and beyond.

  • I for one am quite pleased to see another QNX story. There are so many things about QNX that is 'done right'. It's amusing to read comments from people who dismiss it. So many interesting projects have been done using it. 1. QNX does predate linux by some time. I bought version 1.04 in 1981. QNX users were spoiled by the direct access to the developers they had during this time that raised everyone's bar about the level of Customer service that could be provided. 2. It runs spectacularily well on rather low end hardware, XT, 286, 386 3. The networking is seemless. For instance, if your serial port was tied up on your machine, use one on someone elses! All computer resources, including CPU (per task) was set up this way. It makes writing distributed apps easy. QNX is an excellent architecture. It does real- time extremely well. I encourage all you embedded app developers to take a look at it. Leo Binkowski lbinkowski@NOSPAM.drscape.com
  • My best guess is that he has an iOpener or WebSurfer he wants to make into a firewall.

    How well locked-down is the QNX configuration on iOpeners? Can you modify the OS from within the OS, or do you have to download the "normal" version onto a computer with a flash writer and overwrite the original installation? Is there such thing as the superuser in QNX? Does the superuser account exist on iOpeners? Anybody cracked the password yet?

    Karl

    I'm a slacker? You're the one who waited until now to just sit arround.

  • For smp in QNX RtP check out http://staff.qnx.com/~cdm/smp/.

    How about a working link? The address gets redirected to http://www.qnx.com/company/hr/index.html~cdm/smp/ which just doesn't work at all. I tried playing with various combinations but haven't got to anything except for a careers page.

  • That link does work. Might just be some tempory slashdot effect.
  • Dan Hildebrand (note the spelling) was hired to go work at Quantum Software in the late 80's. He originally worked at a firm here in Winnipeg called Vansco Electronics where I first met him. He raved about this neat thing called QNX and within weeks (and a beer or two :)) I was a convert.

    I like to refer to him as my "mentor" as he was the man that first got me into Unix-ish OSs. Unfortunately Dan passed away in 1998. You can read the QNX page dedicated to him at:

    http://www.qnx.com/danh/

    I didn't keep in touch with him much after he left Winnipeg to move to Ottawa and QNX but I wouldn't be doing what I do had it not been for him.

    Check your facts please.

    grub
  • We know all about the demo disk: hard real time, GUI, TCP/IP, web browser all on one bootable floppy. Now try doing that with Linux, a much newer OS. It used to be fashionable to deride Microsoft's "bloated" software, but now look at a similarly configured Linux setup. Linux is now so big that it's not funny. I am not trolling so much as asking what it is that keeps Linux from offering the kind of efficiency that QNX offers. Is there a fundamental barrier? Was Tanenbaum right after all in that famous exchange with Linus?
  • QNX, prounced I believe "QNIX", was originally created by Dan Hilderbrant back in the very early 80's and first ran on 8086 and 286 class machines. It was formed into Quantum Systems, a Canadian company, and was originally named "QNIX" until AT&T threatened to sue (which is why I believe that remains the correct pronounciation).

    QN(i)X, unlike the name suggests, has no relationship to, code in common with, or even many concepts similar to UNIX systems. It was from the start a fully distributed and true realtime microkernel system using a common message passing architecture applied both locally and over a LAN whereby most services were user mode applications, including file systems and device drivers. In a number of ways QNX achieved much of what Plan 9 had hoped to, some 20 years earlier, and perhaps that is the most comperable system.

    While there were many actually innovate ideas first used widely in QNX, unfortunately it has always been and remains essentially a proprietary system,and this seems both to have limited it's growth, and it's future potential substancially.

  • The proper pronunciation of QNX is kyoo-nihcks.

    I gave QNX a whirl, along with Hard Hat Linux (embedded rtos) and Be.

    Qnx was fast, but Be 'felt' faster. Be had support for my soundchips, but lacked support for wavelan802.11b . QNX lacked sound support and wavelan 802.11b

    Hard Hat is coming along but needs work. Didn't 'feel' as fast as either of the other two. Haven't tried Lineo yet.

    Granted, my soundchip was a cs4237b, and I can't really expect them to have wavelan available yet.
    I'm sorry I haven't got real numbers to back up my early impressions of speed... but one of the biggest interface issues is, does the user get feedback that something has occurred? If it 'feels' slow, it is.

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
  • yah, qnx. thats used in my state's decommissioned nuclear power plant (connecticut yankee nuclear power plant). go QNX ! ;)
  • No it is not pointless. As a professional software developer its nice to have a choice of Oses etc for use in projects, that way you pick the one that best fits your requirments and not have to shoe-horn an existing bloated os into a matchbox. And to be honest, these days Linux as used on a desktop pc is starting to gradually suffer from bloat.
  • "Real Time" simply means that the system will respond within a specified time. It does not necessarily mean that the kernel can be pre-empted, nor does the fact that the kernel can be pre-empted necessarily mean that an operating system is realtime.
  • Where they heck is the ethernet on that thing? They claim it's aimed at couples with two palms who want to be able to sync, control their schedules and browse the web from their coffee table. It's got a built-in 56k modem. HELLO? How many couples do you know like that that still use 56k modems?

    I wish the home electronics manufacturers would at least start shipping with the option of an ethernet port that configs offa DHCP...

  • Don't feed the plants. (Score:3)

    by mpk ( 10222 ) <mpk@uffish.net> on Thursday October 19, 2000 @10:10PM (#690965) Homepage
    Hum.. if this machine is called Audrey, then presumably the next version of it will be the Audrey 2, at which point we really need to start wondering about 3Com's plans for world domination [imdb.com].

  • QNX rocks (Score:5)

    by Huusker ( 99397 ) on Thursday October 19, 2000 @10:20PM (#690966) Homepage

    In 1982, I ported one of the earliest MUDS (Scepter, 1979) from a Cyber 6000 mainframe to a PC using QNX. It supported sixteen users on an IBM PC XT (4Mhz 8-bit 8088 CPU). And no stinking 16650 FIFOs. With 1-character-per-interrupt, 16 users merrily MUD'ed away at 2400 baud.

    In addition to the MUD we offered chat rooms, e-mail, and two other multi-player games (Diplomacy and Space Combat). We charged $2.99 an hour. It paid my way through college.

    Don't believe it? Telnet to drscape.com. To this day it still runs on a 4Mhz PC XT with QNX 1.14.

    Alan Klietz
    Author, Scepter of Goth on QNX
    alank@algintech.NOSPAM.com

  • It has two USB ports. You could always plug in a USB to ethernet adapter. And cable modems can plug into USB.
  • Since when is QNX developed by 3com. Does anyone have anything to back this up? It seems to me that QNX has been around a lot longer than 3com has been. Does anyone know the full (true) story of it's history.
  • What is this? Yesterday we get "The Rise of Amiga", which managed to confuse real Amigas and that new-wave bulldadda they call "Amiga SDK". Now we have "The Rise of QNX". What's next?
    • The Rise of TAOS?
    • The Rise of Xanadu?
    • The Rise of OS/360?

  • Boy I would not try comparing Linux et al. kernel modules to a truely modular architecture. The interface of the kernel modules makes them incredibly fragile, requiring recompilation with every new minor version of the kernel, even when certain kernel options have been activated. QNX services have a relationship to the kernel much like *nix demons do: sure, they use the kernel, but if you change the kernel around a bit, you don't need new demons, unless you want to employ some new kernel feature.

    Frankly, the module system in FreeBSD, Linux, and others is more of a convenient way of keeping portions of the kernel out of memory unless you have a use for it. QNX's big advantage here is the layer of abstraction between these services and the microkernel, using their extremely efficient messaging systems.

    And for the record, if you wanted to make a Linux app fit on a floppy, modules would /not/ be the way to go. You should build all the modules you will need into a custom kernel, then place a statically linked executable next to it.

  • Gee... (Score:1)

    by Wog ( 58146 )
    Isn't that funny? I saw this article about the time those QNX banner ads began appearing at the top of the page.

    Wonder why that could be...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I'd be very worried if someone tried to squeeze an unmodified version of Xfree86 into an embedded device

    A couple of months ago, Handhelds.org had reported getting XFree down to 400k on the iPaq platform. I have no idea what the footprint is now, or what the 400k referred to, disk or memory.

    Regardless, there is much cruft in XFree, even 4.x, and most people read the memory usage wrong. It's not a bad X platform, and could easily fit on a disk, a la Photon (although I believe that's X+a WM)

    --
    Evan (Who used three X Servers before choosing XFree).

  • a!b!c! = as far as you got when learning to read. How appropriate.
  • when was the last time you ran a driver in user space, had it crash, and restarted it without taking your system down for reboot?

    Just yesterday. BeOS.
    --

  • Queue-nucks = comibination of quebec and canucks. How appropriate.

    Anybody out there using inferno or plan 9?
    Viva the obscure OS's
  • See those words at the top of the page?

    That's called an "a r t i c l e".

    If you read it you will find a "link" to their "homepage".

    There you will be embarrassed to learn that your comment makes no sense.

    If only you weren't so american...um...I mean stupid.

  • Qnx Neutrino supports Mips, PowerPC, x86 and I heard about Arm/StrongArm support but haven't seen much about it. Their latest releases are x86 only but I hope they don't completely drop the other architechtures for Qnx RTP and beyond.

    My mistake... I was certain that it was x86 only. This is good if it isn't!

  • Read more about this non open-source OS in a ZDNet story here."

    Ever read that Onion story about they gay man that saved a girl's life when her house caught fire? They went on and on about the hero (who likes to hug and kiss other men) that selflessly put her life ahead of his own.

    don't know why that came to mind just now :-/


    -------
  • If Linux isn't suitable for embedded applications, several groups out there have already proven that it in fact can be made to fit in a nice small space right nicely. IBM's proof of concept linux-on-a-watch is a good example, or the promised linux PDA, Yopy...heck, look at all the people who spent their summer taking the netpliance i-opener, or the websurfer pro and putting linux on them. Sure, plenty of people installed hard drives in those beasts, but there was more than a handful that didn't go that route and just dumped a linux partition image onto the Sandisk disk-on-chip device. Enough people so as to make it practical for a group to make a prefab image known as Jailbait [sourceforge.net] to stick in there under the 16MB limit....with more programs/functionality than netpliance's gimpy little QNX image (btw, for anyone who's itching for another pronunciation war, I pronounce it Kyoo-Enn-Ecks)
    So secondary storage isn't a problem...perhaps you're talking about primary storage and the wonderful universe of volatile memory? The i-opener has 32MB. My laptop has less than that, and I've never seen a problem with it. Perhaps you were talking about something like those Xerox copiers that use an embedded linux kernel buried deep inside that I read about a few years ago.
    Don't make the mistake of assuming that the behavior of linux on your desktop is going to be the same as linux aimed for a cramped enviroment. Ever tried to see how small you can make a kernel? Try taking out all filesystem support. Or PCI support. Make sure you aren't supporting the old a.out binaries. Or plug and play devices. Or floppy disk drives. Or any IP-related stuff that isn't necessary for a non-server. Most of these devices thus far have excluded ethernet cards, so unless your device is among the first to do so, you won't need it here. How bad do you need the console support on a machine that won't have people ever seeing the console?
    So now that you've got your stripped kernel, what if it's too big? Why not go through the source and trim it even more? Who needs a source license and NDA's up the wazoo just to make it work on a prototype platform?
    ok, so maybe Linux isn't the answer for everything and everybody...but to make a general statement like "Linux is not really suitable for small embedded applications, since it has a large" (you never actually finished this sentence, it's that vague...) says exactly nothing. Add to that your assumption that these devices have less memory than a fair amount of them do...and we have BLATANT UNPROVED ASSERTIONS! Whee!

    Come back when you have some facts to back these up.

    -transiit

  • The big reason I haven't gotten into QNX is their lack of using the GNU toolchain. Now I noticed someone here mentioned that QNX is older than GNU (established 1983-84), which would explain why they didn't use it off-the-bat. But you would have figured that they would have moved over to the GNU toolchain sometime since. Expecially in light of numerous other, commercial RTOS' use of the GNU toolchain (e.g., VxWorks).

    -- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

  • As an Ontario high-school student of 10 years ago (and a resident of Kanata where QNX is based) I have to say - really?

    I wasn't into computers enough at the time to know what O/S they were running. I'm amazed it was QNX. What did they use for the GUI? Must have been something proprietary. Also if memory serves it was a client/server setup and the Icons we used ran everything over the network from a central server.

    Ah man, the Logo interpreter and all that dorky educational doftware on the Icon - those wree the days :)


  • The coolest things about QNX (Score:5)

    by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @01:58AM (#690992) Homepage
    No one has mentioned the coolest things about QNX -- notably its architecture. QNX is a highly reliable, real-time OS based on message passing. It really is a microkernel OS. Even device and filesystem drivers run in userspace. This makes it incredibly stable, as you can actually crash a driver, restart it, and keep going. You can also upgrade subsystems without taking the machine offline. QNX is used in systems that cannot fail, such as heart monitors.

    It's also really efficiently written, and almost completely modular (as opposed to Linux' monolithic-plus-kitchen-sink approach). Their 1.44MB Floppy demo contains the bootloader and kernel, a GUI, a web wrowser, tcp/ip and PPP. No other OS can do that, because they're too bloated. Linux can be put in a floppy, but there's no way to fit a GUI and a web browser as well. YOu might be able to chuck out things like the shell and libc, and include a statically-linked version of lynx, but nothing as good as the QNX demo can be achieved.

    QNX is much more suitable for PDAs and otehr small systems than is Linux. It's loads more reliable, more easily upgradable, and much more compact. Just look at the iOpener; into 16MB they fit the OS, a custom GUI built on top of the QNX GUI, web browser, email, telnet server, and other things, and hadspace left over to store files. The only other OS that could do that is WinCE, and it's much more limited than QNX (such as a limit of 32 processes, 22 of which are consumed by the system itself).

    QNX rocks!

    ________________________________________
  • Well, actually . . . there's a group of ex-Amigans who are actively involved with QNX.

    The Phoenix Consortium [slashdot.org]
    Our intention is to establish a migration path to a new Amiga-like platform and computing experience. By clearly defining the standards and specs Phoenix hardware and software developers will be using we thus provide a common basis for individual developers to proceed with their own development stategies.
    --

  • The QNX Realtime Platform has virtual memory. I have a 128MB swap file on my machine.
  • The slashdot post made it look like QNX was developed by 3-Com. The referenced article made it clear that QNX is a separate, Canadian company.

    I remember when QNX came out, I remember a few people raving about it, and I don't remember ever hearing anybody say anything nasty about it, so It's good to see a nice company start to get some real attention (now, if we could only get them to release their source...).
    `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!

  • It didn't seem to me that anywhere in the article it was mentioned that they are even interested in becoming a general OS such as Linux or *BSD. All the products mentioned were embedded applications. They have a long and distinguished track record in doing things like running nuclear power plants where you definitely don't want to be running Windows.

  • Yes the ICON...actually I used it in high school back in 83 so it's closewr to 20 years old. And your also right about the whole 3com thing...my buddy is one of there head engineers in Kanata and he would be very surprised to find out that 3dom owns them...
  • When you see you mailcarrier note the bundle of mail in his hand. It is sorted by QNX. QNX powers whe letter sorting machines at the US Postal Service. (@ 40k letters per hour) I deal with it everyday, and QNX never gives us a bit of trouble. If there is a problem with the sorted mail, it is not from the program, but from a worn belt, bad zip, or a OCR out of adjustment. I have seen the geeks who repair our computers go from Windows zombies into QNX fans. They are even complaining that open source solution were not considered by the Postal service.

    BTW, they Love WebObjects. It powers the Postal Services intranet.

  • Re:QNX rocks (Score:4)

    by hackerm ( 148340 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @12:21AM (#691013)
    Don't believe it? Telnet to drscape.com. To this day it still runs on a 4Mhz PC XT with QNX 1.14.

    At least it used to, before you posted it to /.
    Poor XT...
  • Now, if only that durn thing would run on something besides an X86 processor, it would be worth consideration for all those embedded appliances you talk about. There was an announcement some time ago from the QNX folks, saying that they were dropping the WatCOM folks and switching to Code Warrior for their development platform, and simultaneously (because the Code Warrior has all these backends, you see) they were going to port to multiple CPU's. Well, the Code Warrior folks backed out (they smelled more money in doing Motorola's reference Linux development implementation), and left QNX holding the bag. They had to go back to WatCOM and 'eat crow'. What a mess. This isn't the first time that MetroWerks has jerked the rug out from under somebody. Remember the promises surrounding a port of the Pro version of Code Warrior to RedHat? Where is it now? Hmmm? MetroJerks has shown that they can't be trusted to keep a promise. They just follow the money, wherever it happens to be at the moment, and to hell with all the promises they just made...
  • Shouldn't the developers of this technology invest their time and effort into developing an established technology further?

    Linux is just starting to make inroads. It seems pointless (to me) that another OS should be pushed like this. Economies of scale people.

    DISCLAIMER: This is MY opinion. I'm not telling you what's right, wrong, whatever. I might be wrong. I'm probably right. Please tell me, either way.

    Cheers,
    Daniel.

    --

    Daniel Zeaiter
    daniel@academytiles.com.au
    http://www.academytiles.com.au
    ICQ: 16889511

  • It seems pointless (to me) that another OS should be pushed like this. Economies of scale people.

    Some people (e.g. me) think that the platforms that are currently enjoying the benefits of economy of scale, happen to be really, really lame and uninteresting.

    I think everyone should support whatever they like best, and then if something gets a good economy of scale after that, fine. But for everyone to sacrifice their values and settle for a concensus of mediocrity (e.g. x86, Windoze, Linux) just for the sake of getting economy of scale, is destructive to the overall state of the art.


    ---
  • Pick something other than x86: http://www.qnx.com/products/os/neutrino.html#CPU
  • A few years back, I made a disk that did the following things.

    It booted a dos 6.22 environment with ramdisk support (4MB ramdisk. Memory was a lot more expensive back then) It then ran PKunzip on my custom zipfile which dumped just enough win3.1 files in the ramdisk (things like WIN.COM, a few DLLs, SYSTEM.DAT, ARIAL.TTF, FILEMAN.EXE, and NOTEPAD.EXE). I could've spanned the zipfile to another floppy and had more, but it was enough to have a single disk that gave me a GUI, a filemanager, and a text editor.
    (I've got an early version of this still around somewhere. Enough to squeeze a standard-mode win3.1 environment on a 1.44 floppy uncompressed, if anyone's interested, maybe I'll dig it up and do a filelisting or something so you can go off and recreate it yourself)

    So could I redo this in a linux environment? Yes. I would have to write my own custom GUI and browser to do it, but I'm confident with enough effort, it could be done. Maybe the answer is even easier and it would just be "Hey, port photon to linux along with its browser and we've got the same thing"

    You've gone off and made the mistake of assuming either that the linux kernel is always going to be way too big or that they put the whole QNX OS on that floppy or that the gui and browser are part of the qnx kernel. I'd be very worried if someone tried to squeeze an unmodified version of Xfree86 into an embedded device -- you think that's what TiVo's using? The jailbait image that I referred to above manages to squeeze a copy of Xfree, Netscape Navigator, Blackbox, and a bunch of other stuff within the 16MB limit. Sure, they were doing stuff like what I did with packing things into compressed archives and loading them into a ramdisk, but I'm confident that with some custom coding, you could do a lot better. (if they didn't build XF86_SVGA without support for anything but the chipset in the i-opener, they probably could've saved some space right there.)

    So the better question is can you make a linux kernel that fits in 1.44MB - ((diskspace for gui) + (diskspace for browser) + (diskspace for any necessary commands)). I think you can.

    --transiit
  • I'm sure that when I tried out QNX RTP it had GNU development tools (gcc etc.) with it. There's also a largr number of everyone's fav. Linux apps ported..

    I tried out RTP when it came out, they had ports for (but not limited to)
    - gtk
    - x11amp
    - gimp
    - ssh
    - mc
    - vi
    - (maybe emacs..)
    - abiword
    - a Mozilla port that I couldn't find
    - many, many others.

    Overall, the OS was smokin' fast, they're going to be using IBM's JDK (actually developed in Ottawa too by one of the object* companies.) They also had good 3D support for my Voodoo 3, and had demos of Q3 to prove it..

    The browser was pretty good, the photon interface was good (but not as nice as the DE's for Linux.) Anyway, I was quite imoressed. Maybe you should give it a spin...

    Ben

  • About the ICON... (Score:3)

    by tsangc ( 177574 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @02:57AM (#691041)
    Thirdly, it is not *just* an embedded OS, its most prominant use (atleast to Ontario and Quebec elemenrtary and secondary school students some 10 years ago) was on the PC powering that evil Unisys companies line of diskless 80186 based network computers called the Icon of which our schools had ungodly amounts of. QNX is also used quite extensively in the Canadian Armed Forces and can be used as a desktop OS.

    The original ICON was built by a firm called CEMCORP, Canadian Educational Microprocessors (or Microcomputers, but I think it was the former) specifically for the Canadian educational market. IIRC they were 8086's with about 512K or 640K of RAM, and CGA graphics but done in an unusual configuration, not PC standard. They were the large square chassis built with military grade steel and had an integrated keyboard with a trackball on the right, with an "Action" key for the mouse button. They were ridiculously overbuilt. The ICON's were workstations running over Arcnet (ICONNET) IIRC, into a fileserver called the Lexicon, which carried a 30MByte hard disk interfaced via ESDI or ST506 MFM.

    The next-gen ICON was the ICON2, built by Unisys using an 80186, in the grey single piece monitor/CPU and the detachable keyboard/trackball unit. Some ICON2's integrated SCSI IIRC to host an LMSI single speed CDRom reader. Apparently there was an ICON3 which was a 80386, but IIRC it was a basic Unisys clone PC. The Unisys icons eventually allowed for emulation of MSDOS but it was painfully slow.

    The ICON system ran QNX on both the ICON and LEXICON in a full multiuser configuration. There was a graphical layer, called Ambience, and a number of nifty programs (I really like the paint package, it made me buy an Amiga later on) mostly written by the Ontario government and University of Waterloo.

    The machines were ridiculously slow-because of the reliance on the LEXICON and the slow 2MBps network. If the Lexicon crashed (and it did regularily) the entire system needed to rebooted, which took 15 minutes plus. Needless to say this wasn't popular with teachers with only 30 minute class periods. The hardware, at least mechanically, was extremely well designed. The machines were obviously designed for the classroom, and I can't remember a machine being damaged physically-they knew the target market well-the keyboards had oversized areas to get to the trackball, they were relatively indestructable, and they had headphone jacks up front for quiet use.

    ICONS were very far ahead in concept (each student was suppsoed to have their own workspace, true multiuser, each teacher could look at each student) but poorly implemented (poor training, not enough time to set everything up properly). Improper administrator (usually the school librarian or a really bright kid) and/or teacher training made it even worse. I remember learning all about it when the school VP let me (at age 12) read all the QNX manuals.

    Calum The ICON's were

  • eCos Product Page. [redhat.com]
    eCos Development Page [redhat.com]

    Currently working with it for a NAS solution. Have also used QNX Neutrino and WindRiver VxWorks.

  • This is NOT a waste of time (Score:5)

    by 198348726583297634 ( 14535 ) on Thursday October 19, 2000 @09:04PM (#691043) Journal
    No, despite the billion uses for Linux, how compact and trimmed you can get it, etc etc, QNX still has a very valuable place in the computer world.

    It's NOT LINUX!!

    It's good to have choice. That's why we have a bazillion window managers and theming skinnable apps that give you a billion ways to dump core. >:(

    But aside from the bland "choice is good" mantra, QNX has definite good qualities of its own - it's very lightweight, very fast, has a decent GUI system going for it (despite not having DND, which I deem a semi-serious flaw, but one that could be tackled), and it could teach other people a thing or two yet with the way it does stuff. And even if it doesn't even have anything to teach, it's still a potentially very useful OS to run on one's computer. Time will tell. Time and apps.

    Don't dump on it (yet).

    GAIN EVERLASTING LIFE! [alexchiu.com]

  • Linux is not really suitable for small embedded applications, since it has a large(in terms of the memory these appliances have, not in terms of other oses), so I don't think it overlaps too much with other existing operating systems.
    Whether or not it is needed at all, however, is another matter.
  • It supports a form of modules. That was one of the points of the post -- the Linux Kernel is as modular as a monolithic kernel can be.
    --
  • I didn't. I just said that the Linux Kernel's modules did exist, and were as modular as they could be from a monolithic kernel.


    --
  • "The last thing I take with me camping is something I won't use." ... that's my point :-p QNX is great for embedded devices, but Linux can do that (although less well) and more. It's great for those of us who don't camp, but can use all the various tools and devices in a swiss army knife.

    "for teh love of god zealots, think outside of the box. "

    Rofl.. "EH LUUNIX GODS MUST BE APPEASED! UES LINUS, IT RAX)R@#!RT JEFFK IS HAX)R!"

    I'm not a zealot. Just someone try to present a nice balanced view, since your posting seemed to be bandwagon jumping onto QNX.
    --
  • "But of course you wouldn't feel so clever using a system that works straight off without you having to prove how knowledgeable you are would you?" .. why of course not, that's why I'm writing my own OS.

    Sarcasm aside, this is a funny troll posting. Even if you didn't mean to be a troll, that's exactly what you're doing.
    --

  • Sucky attitude (Score:3)

    by uradu ( 10768 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @03:17AM (#691062)
    QNX never suffered from a lack of technical merits. Its main problem was a certain marketing arrogance on the side of the parent company. They simply were never terribly interested in selling QNX to mere mortals. If a prospective licensee wasn't going to embed it in at least 10 million units or what have you, they simply didn't show any interest. My previous company wanted to use it in an embedded networked device for industrial control. But since the projected volume was very low (hundreds of units a year max), the prices quoted for QNX were stratospheric, so we went with PharLap instead. Can't say I was happy with the choice--Linux would have been much more flexible, albeit more bloated--but for a device selling for $500 it doesn't make any sense to pay half that just for OS royalties.

    While I've heard all the arguments from QNX fans as to why this marketing model makes sense, it doesn't change the fact that an OS copy not sold is money lost, either way you look at it. How could they possibly be better off not selling me the OS at all, versus licensing it at $50 or so a pop? They should simply introduce a layered support mechanism, giving more support to those who pay more, and less (mailing lists, FAQs, KBs etc) to those who pay less.

  • gave it a try, not horribly impressed (Score:3)

    by Lx ( 12170 ) on Thursday October 19, 2000 @09:21PM (#691065)
    Worth mentioning that QNX RTP is available for download from their site. Gave it a try about a week ago, and it does have its good points - i went from booting the CD to being up and running in about 10-15 minutes, with network and graphics configs as well. Nice. They have a nifty little web browser, and REALLY nice package management - Linux could learn a thing or two from it. They have a reasonable amount of software, the interface is pretty responsive, and it's pretty easy to use.

    The downsides - I hate the filesystem layout - it's really confusing, moreso than other unices. The interface is allright, but it's not as well designed as other ones I've tried. It'll be cool for embedded applications, but as a desktop OS, which is more what RTP is, it doesn't beat *BSD/Linux or BeOS. What's frustrating is that they've been able to garner a lot of support from other vendors, having a JVM and Flash and RealPlayer, Quake III (!) and lots of hardware support, compared to BeOS which is just now getting these things and has had lots of problems with hardware vendors.

    All in all, I reccomend giving it a try, but I don't think I'd use it regularly. Between BeOS and FreeBSD, all my needs are pretty much satisfied. Well, cept for when I need to boot Windows to play Counter-Strike.

    -lx
  • 3COM as a company had nothing to do with QNX development.

    The original name of QNX was QUNIX, but some large telephony corp asked them to change the name to prevent confusion.

    QNX started in 1981, 3COM in 1984. And, as pointed out, QNX is a canadian concern.

  • QNX has been around far longer than Linux. So perhaps Linus should have not developed the original kernel and should have instead went to work for Quantum (QNX developers)?

    In any case, its not completely relevant. QNX isn't 'Free' software in source-code availability terms.

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