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Programming IT Technology

QNX Realtime Platform Now Available 161

Posted by Hemos from the yet-another-os dept.
A reader writes "The QNX development platform is now available. It's available in three versions: the Windows-based self-extracting installer, the ISO image and the QNX4 install archive" You can also get it from QNX's site itself.
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QNX Realtime Platform Now Available More

QNX Realtime Platform Now Available

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  • My point was that you do not need to recompile the kernel in order to change hardware.
    --
  • It is not real easy to use kernel drivers between different versions.

    If you mean binary drivers, then yes.

    Okay, that means that there is a very close relation between the kernel and the driver

    Again, yes.

    That means that the kernel is monolithic

    No. What makes the kernel monolithic is that the drivers are not separate userspace processes.

    For example, my NVIDIA drivers required me to downgrade a kernel version and recompile in order to work properly

    Your NVIDIA drivers are broken. Go bitch at the provider of your closed, propriatory hardware.

    Who said anything about ALSA? I was talking about OSS.

    Actually you said that a kernel recompile was necessary in order to change sound hardware. ALSA trivially demonstrates that that isn't true. Even if you are talking about OSS, you still don't need to change your kernel. You made an incorrect claim.

    For example, iptables often requires patches to the kernel.

    That's because iptables is part of the development kernel. It's a beta. It's not guaranteed to work. If you don't want to have to apply patches, then use a stable kernel.

    My aformentioned NVIDIA drivers are terribly closely tied to the kernel version.

    From the above, I assume you're using a 2.4 kernel. This is still in development, and as a result the API will change without warning. If the NVIDIA driver was part of the kernel then it would be fixed as the API changes were made and there wouldn't be a problem. If you don't want to deal with that sort of thing yourself, stop using development kernels.

    I can't take my sidwinder driver from one kernel and stick it into another.

    Which sidewinder driver? If you're talking about the binary module produced from the kernel joystick drivers, then I've already explained that there has never been any guarantee that the binary API of the kernel would remain consistant.

    You got to the heart of the problem. There is no stable driver API. That encourages a close connection between driver and kernel. That means it is a monolithic kernel. I don't care if I'm using the term wrong from a technical point of view (though I'm not, Linux IS monolithic technically) but I'm using from a "English" point of view.

    (Warning - analogy ahead)

    BeOS is a Microsoft operating system. I don't care if I'm using the term wrong from the technical point of view, but BeOS's closed model and pretty graphics demonstrate that I'm right when using it from an "English" point of view.

    You can't redefine technical terms in a technical discussion. Yes, Linux is monolithic. No, this is not the reason that it has no consistant binary driver API. Would you call a microkernel that had the same "feature" monolithic? If so, you're an idiot. If not, your argument falls down.

  • Re:QNX on a floppy? (Score:3)

    by v4mpyr ( 185039 ) on Monday September 25, 2000 @12:50PM (#755384)
    n/m . . . I found it [qnx.com]. %-)

    --
  • I dont fuck goats, I'm from montana. we fuck sheep.
  • you trying to compare things that can't be compared, like saying a $80k porche is better than a $80k semi-truck. Damn right the porche is faster when you punch the gas, but try hauling 10 tons of cargo on a porche.

    QNX is made for perticular tasks in a real-time environment, Linux is made for complex tasks with powerfull hardware(i mean more than a 15mhz chip and 256k ram).

    You can't compare the two. An RTLinux is just a spin to make linux quicker and more responsive.

  • Re:But read the licenses (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I work at QNX - anyone looking for official statements should look to the QNX web site [qnx.com] and ignore what I have to say. That said:

    The license agreement makes the lawyers happy but greatly overstates the case. Most of the core technology in the RTP as it stands today is released and fully supported by QNX both for development and runtime application (QNX Neutrino OS, core Photon GUI, compiler and libs, voyager web browser etc).

    What is not released are some of the other components that make for a better installation experience or a more rounded desktop development environment but are probably not ready yet for commercial release. I say probably because there are bound to be people out there for whom the RTP just plain doesn't work. There will be some hardware, some way in which its used, that we just hadn't anticipated or seen before.

    Given the number of people out there who will try it, there will probably be a whole lot of cases like that. There's only so much we can cover in the lab.

    With useful feedback from the community to guide us hopefully we will be able to bring the remaining components to release quality in short order.

  • It is. It takes 5 minutes.

  • RTLinux ~10 microseconds
    QNX ~0.8 microseconds

    I knew about RTLinux's benchmark and knew QNX was better, but damn that is good... I'm assuming this is on identical hardware?

    RTLinux is a soft realtime platform if I'm not mistaken. It's a patched uClinux (does it patch against regular Linux?) which basically runs the kernel as "just another" process, which means your process(es) can pre-empt it. What kind of voodoo magic is QNX doing? Can RTLinux approach the 1uS mark?

  • Tell me if you get it working; I haven't tried QNX at all.

    Sure, let's move to there...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • it's not supposed to replace your os, dork

    it's for embedded devices

    the mythical network toaster & friends
    .oO0Oo.
  • All this "Be is better than QNX and they're both better than Linux" "NO THEY AREN'T" stuff is pointless. Linux evolved as a full-size all-purpose Unix capable of all the range of activities of any commercial Unix, from webserving to high-performance clustering to heavy database usage. Amazingly, it also manages to be a decent desktop OS.

    BeOS and QNX are specialists, of course they're going to outperform Linux in their specialities (or they wouldn't be up to much). Outside their niches they don't compete at all. It's pretty silly trying to compare them in the first place.

  • I wish people wouldn`t confuse QNX 4 (which is on the demo disk) and QNX RtP. The newest release is QNX RtP which is based on the newer Neutrino kernel. The idea of QNX RtP was to take the stuff that made QNX 4 great and make it into a scaleable desktop/handheld OS. And I managed to get through all that without mentioning the amiga community :)
  • I love it. I probobly used, about every OS operating systems out there, and so far, I think QNX has one of the nices interfaces out there. Hopefully It will get some following from open source community.
  • Driver is called "banshee.o". Web site says it supports Banshees and Voodoo3 (?!?). No mention of Voodoo2 or SLI. No other supported video card has 3D support. Ummm... guess the Quake and Unreal ports included with the thing aren't going to be all that and a bag of potato chips.
  • I recieved my copy of the Mac OS X Public Beta today, as well as the develement tools. (I'm a member of the ADC)

    According to Apple, the dev tools (gcc/g++, InterfaceBuilder, ProjectBuilder and a bunch of little apps) will be available for free on-line. It will require a free registration. I believe sometime in October, but don't quote me on that.
  • I'm making a mirror the RTP for people wanting to
    download in Australia/New Zealand (only, sorry)

    ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/qnx/qnxrtp/
    http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/qnx/qnxrtp/

    -jason
  • I actually spent the summer working with QNX (for robotic systems) and it is pretty cool. It is drastically different from any other *nix I've played with (granted thats fairly limited) but if you read the docs its managable.

    One thing I've been wondering though is will livid work with it? If so, perhaps it will make the dvd's actually watchable in a unix environment. On my PIII 650 laptop the dvd playback keeps getting prempted by the kernel, and skips. Annoying.
  • Well, writing the driver for Linux, you most likely could recompile it for QNX (or reuse much of the code, anyway...). So therefore RTLinux doesn't really have a great benefit, since most of that code should also compile using QNX.

    Yeah, Linux for real time. Soft real time requirements, is doable, probably. Hard real time with narrow time requirements for processing and such ?

    Not really...
  • You're right that there's some FUD in that article, but it wasn't written by Be. The Be engineers know what they're talking about, but some of the fans go overboard a bit.
  • If it took me 4 hours to compile a kernel I think my arm would get sore.
  • Thanks for repeating exactly the same links that appear in the article write-up. You sure helped a lot of people that way.
  • Microsoft isn't a real word. However, you COULD say that it was commercial, proprietory, closed-source, or anything inbetween. For example, you can say it is object oriented. It doesn't actually have an object model, and it doesn't treat everything as an object (which is what object orientation technically means), but the OS is built on a set of objects, so the claim is still true.

    Monolithic IS a real word. Something monolithic is anything that is one large, closely connected mass. Even if the kernel ran drivers as seprate processes, if there was a super-close connection between the two, then it would still be monolithic. I would consider something modular if it had a set of clearly defined, more or less invariant interfaces between components, even if the thing was one honking large binary.
  • No, actually I'm not. I'm not saying QNX *should* by released GPL, I'm just saying it'd be cool if something like QNX was GPLled.
    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."
  • There is no Fear, Uncertainty or Doubt in this message.

    Linux uses a monolithic kernel, that is a fact. Sure, Linux has LKMs, but those were only a hack because the kernel was growing too big...

    Even after the LKM *hack*, a lot of people still find it necessary to use BZ2 to compress their kernel because it's still too big.

    Sure, you can switch *some* hardware without recompiling, but only that which is already a module...

    Rebooting to install hardware is dumb and shouldn't be necessary.
  • It looks like Be is spreading some FUD here

    Point of order: BeNews != Be, Inc.

  • With risk of being redundant . . . QNX has a 1.44M Demodisk [qnx.com] you can download for free. It's pretty sweet. It boots off a floppy, resides in flash RAM, has a GUI, a web browser, server (this is new), TCP/IP and a few applications. Yes, all on a 1.44M floppy. I used to play with this back when it first came out but it looks like they've really made some strides with it.

    Might hold you over till the CDs come out. :-)

    --

  • Two questions (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One. They say when you boot, you get a choice of Windows or QNX. Does that mean lilo or grub would get overwritten? Has anyone tried it on a system that was already dual boot?

    Two. Is there any way to install on a Linux machine without repartitioning?
  • BP6tastic :)
  • All that V2 and banshee have in common is 3dfx. I think that you are confusing V2 with V3 which could be called banshee 2.
  • Apparently not...

    Slashdot is just useless these days.

    So what's up?
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • The mediaplayer included with QNX RtP is supposed to incorporate the Xing DVD player. Guess you don't need livid then.
  • I really don't see what you guys are getting so excited about. What sets QNX apart from all the other commercial RTOSes out there? It's a commercial endeavour! Yes, you can download a demo disk. But you don't get full source and you're not allowed to use it for any real work. Sounds pretty much like VxWorks or any one of the dozens of other competitors to me. Call them, they'll send you a free demo too!

    Read the FAQ. Their opinions are stated in plain view:

    Q: Why doesn't QNX provide source to the kernel and other core OS modules?
    A: Because QNX developers don't need kernel source to extend the OS.

    Anyone who's ever done serious work in embedded systems know the kernel source is absolutely essential for debugging, not only the application but also the kernel. All OSes contain kernel bugs. They're a pain to find and fix without source, and those of us who've been there are not going back lightheartedly. You all know this, that's why we're embracing open source. How come so many of you are now eager to jump back into the dark hole that is proprietary software?

    For embedded work, there's ECOS [redhat.com] already. It's Free Software and runs on a dozen different CPUs, with new ports coming all the time. If you want the 3D acceleration, anti-aliases graphics and macromedia player, you're probably not looking for embedded stuff in the first place.

    Sure, QNX is fun. Play away. But it isn't the future.

  • Beos is dead?

    oh my god.

    I think there are so much new thing coming out that it's impossible to say so.

    If you need to change your os every moth .. you are dead ... :)
  • I was lucky enough to be one of the folks that got the pre-beta back in May. The first thing I did after installing was pop the Matrix in my DVD drive and startup Doom in another window. I could drag the Doom window around the screen and both Doom and the Matrix kept right on without a hiccup.

    Cool :-)
  • Now that is FUD. I've installed an up-to-date Linux distro into a 25mhz 486 Laptop with a 170mb hard disk - and got X in with room to spare.

    You are one lame asshole

  • You're plainly wrong here.
    Not only that but the schmuck is using a second account to mark himself up. Or he has friends doing it. Either way it's rank.
  • Try posting at the qnx news server inn.qnx.com
  • you shouldn't need to reboot a machine to upgrade the kernel.

    Don't quote me on this, but I had heard rumours about HP-UX being able to recompile it's kernal on the fly (taking it down to single user mode)

    Not real sure on any of the details, probably just vapour-ware I guess

  • No kidding. It seems that the entire net is getting more useless. Either that or it's been a couple of slow news months.

    The problem, btw, was PCMCIA. Booting with a 3C option got me to a shell, but starting photon kills the keyboard. Grr. Time to try on a desktop machine.

    Continue in sid=pb?

  • If karma were so dear to me, then wouldn't I too post this anonymously? But I'm not, so something must be amiss.

    You're conflating two different problems, here. Read slashdot's faq [slashdot.org], and you'll find that Rob explicitly asks people with the +1 bonus to use it liberally, so that they can continually be judged as worthy or unworthy to maintain its use. A true karmawhore and coward would only use it when hoping to gain karma, while posting at 1 or as AC (such as you have done) when expressing controversial opinions. And I'll kindly remind you that your ad-hominem slanderous attack of 'karmawhore' does nothing to refute my original argument.

    Being a respected poster on slashdot isn't about selling your soul for a small incrementing integer (karma). It's about making informed comments, insightful retorts to errors, and interesting analogies to external experiences. At the end of the day, ask yourself whether you've contributed or detracted from slashdot's signal to noise ratio. If only others took as much care as I do, the world would be a better place.
  • Why can't the transit system be this efficient?

    QNX == Cool hackware, sold by hackers to users, on their own money. Demand and features are market driven.

    Mass transit == A bad hack, forced on unsuspecting users by politicians, with the users money. Demand and features both artificially inflated and deflated by same politicians who also ensure they are the only game in town.

  • Linux uses a monolithic kernel, that is a fact. Sure, Linux has LKMs, but those were only a hack because the kernel was growing too big...

    ... and QNX has to have a filesystem + a disk subsystem compiled in otherwise it will be unable to load additional servers. Let's be fair.

    Sure, you can switch *some* hardware without recompiling, but only that which is already a module...

    And QNX modules don't need to be compiled? News to me...

    I think I'll go back to work now, on my Linux box running GNOME with the micoGUI Photon-esque theme installed. I'm sure QNX is great and all, but It's about 5 years too late for the free UNIX market.

    The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

  • Their download site seems to be down. Sucky
  • Anyone who's ever done serious work in embedded systems know the kernel source is absolutely essential for debugging, not only the application but also the kernel.
    Interesting comment considering that QNX have been in the embedded field for 20 years! Not everything in the world has to be open source to work. By not releasing the source QNX hope to keep the kernel from fragmenting. Linus does pretty much the same thing in a different way.
  • Wasn't this preview based on an ancient beta?
    ---

  • Aaarrrgh! Please say this isn't so! I don't want to have to pirate^H^H^H^H^H^Hbuy 'Doze just so I can run Neutrino.

    Oh well, I think I'll just wait for the CD. I'm betting my sanity that the OS will be bootable.


    ---
  • The beta was released only a few weeks before this one.
  • Oh you incredible troll. Even DOS, that terribly old OS, is a popular embed operating system.

    Having an embeded system that you're comfortable with on a home system can outweight an exactly tailored `solution` (ha! ha!).

  • jeez, moderators, you call this flamebait ??!!!!
    If the guy said windows partition instead of BeOS partition then you would have moderated it as 'Insightful' or 'Funny"...
    oh, well....

  • if you can come up with a better reason than the ones that have already been debunked for why microkernels are "better" then please do so.

    Ha ha! He just did, in the very post that you're flaming (except that he didn't really say microkernels are better; all he did was prove it, and then let you draw your own conclusion). And that reason is: GPLed drivers (e.g. ALSA) run in their own address space (instead of linking with the kernel) thereby avoiding the possibility of GPL violation if QNX wants to keep the kernel source closed. I bet Sun wishes Solaris could do that.


    ---
  • Can anyone explain me, please, what's the difference between a tar.F file and an ISO image there. QNX site says that add-on stuff is on the disk. So, if it is 91 megs in size, does it mean the stuff is there? On the other hand, tar.F file is only 24 megs long. Does it mean it is just so well compressed or it has fewer packages than on the disk. I'm confused.
  • I only had two points. I'm not talking about monolithic in the technical sense (I rarely talk about anything in the strict technical sense) but in the end-result sense. One often has to recompile the kernel in order to insert new hardware. This is because there is a close association with the hardware and the drivers. Thus, it is monolithic. The fact that a kernel upgrade requires me to recompile doesn't surprise me, the fact that I have to recompile the modules as well does. This implies way to close of a link between kernel and driver. The vast-majority of the cases may be true for trival hardware, but is decidely not true for major items like video-cards and sound cards.
  • >Given that most hardware requires you to switch off the power to install it,
    >I suggest you take this up with the hardware manufacturers as well.

    DO they??? That explains more than one thing about my new faulty videocard.....

    *grin*

  • Not really. There's a *lot* of geeks that use something other than RedHat (eg. *BSD, Debian, SuSE, BeOS, QNX, Solaris, to name a few)
    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."
  • Why not just download it -)

    Get.qnx.com is the way to go.
  • Exactly why I can play more than a dozen MP3s (14 or 15 on my PII 300) on BeOS (which btw has a two year old version of GCC) while Linux chokes on a measly half-dozen? Also why I can go along not even noticing that some wayard process is chewing up 100% of my CPU, while something like a big compile or untar job makes GNOME noticablly choppier?
  • A disk driver in QNX deals with the disk interface and disk, and leaves the job of putting a file system (DOS, QNX, Linux) on top of it to a file system DLL. QNX supports DOS, QNX and Linux filesystems on disk, and some others that are found on CD-ROMS and yet other file systems over networks.
  • The first thing I'd do is wipe my Linux partition...
    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."
  • "bzImage" stands for Big Compressed (z) image. The actual compression used is vanilla zlib I think.
  • a lot of people still find it necessary to use BZ2 to compress their kernel because it's still too big.

    Sigh. The "b" in "bzImage" stands for "big". On x86, the Linux kernel is generally stored as a gzipped file (note that this isn't true of most other architectures that Linux runs on. PPC, for instance, doesn't use a compressed kernel). The only difference between zImage and bzImage is that the code used to start the kernel is capable of dealing with bigger files in the second case. zImage only exists now because a tiny amount of hardware didn't like the newer code, a situation which has now been fixed.

    Sure, you can switch *some* hardware without recompiling, but only that which is already a module...

    Almost all hardware can be compiled as a module from an existing source tree and inserted into a running kernel. If it worries you, compiling the kernel with everything as a module is a perfectly valid thing to do. No reboots for changed hardware then.

    Rebooting to install hardware is dumb and shouldn't be necessary.

    Given that most hardware requires you to switch off the power to install it, I suggest you take this up with the hardware manufacturers as well.
  • I am constantly amazed at the amount of really cool, really quality stuff, that people, real companies even, are pumping out for free. For a "free" OS, the QNX developers sure have put a lot of effort into something that wouldn't seem to me to generate any profit for them. According to the BeNews review, QNX looks and feels slick and trim. I am amazed at how much effort was put into making this a functional desktop OS. Add to that their full POSIX compliance and their (eventual if not immediate) open sourcing of a lot of the code.

    Not to slight BeOS. BeOS is amazing as well. I think we geeks have it pretty damn good. I just wish I had enough machines and a big enough internet connection to play around with all these freebies.
  • as always...
    • 2000-06-21 13:41:51 sound of spoon in coffee (science,humor) (rejected)
    • 2000-07-21 14:05:28 Light can break its own speed limit (articles,science) (rejected)
    • 2000-07-27 20:29:15 Potata web server II (articles,hardware) (rejected)
    • 2000-09-25 18:00:39 download QNX RTP for free! (articles,news) (rejected)

    --
  • I am currently posting this from QNX, right now. It installed in a few minutes on a 1GB partition (didn't try smaller, but it seems that 500M would have been more than enough). It is very fast. (For the record, I am running an Athlon 700 with a GeForce 2 GTS, so... even windows is very fast.) The web browser displays slashdot nicely, and all of the fonts are beautiful. They get even better if you turn on antialiasing, :-), but even without it they are far better than X. The network installer seems a bit flaky (it seems to display different packages at different times), but it does not seem to be much of a problem. Actually, all of the network code seems a bit flaky... but it seems to autoconfigure itself and fix whatever is wrong (i'm using a dhcp cable modem.) While typing, I just connected to IRC succesfully... (first time.) Lastly, the GUI is... cool. Try it, it's a small download compared to ... even BeOS.

    --

  • Blue Sky: Hot kernel upgrade? (Score:3)

    by jovlinger ( 55075 ) on Monday September 25, 2000 @05:31PM (#755453) Homepage
    Blue sky warning here. How hard would it be to checkpoint a kernel?

    What I'm after is a way of bringing a machine down in such a way that application processes can be frozen, a new kernel swapped in, and the applications unthawed.

    It all comes down to is how much kernel state a process has; by definition very little. It has at most handles for internal kernel datastructures. So as long as the two kernel versions know enough about each other to translate those, you shouldn't need to reboot a machine to upgrade the kernel.

    The big thing I've overlooked is hardware state; things like BIOS/network/whatever. These services will likely need to be restarted.

    Thoughts?
  • QNXStart.com [qnxstart.com] is a new third party developers forum for QNX. Unfortunately it is not a mirror site
    But it has some downloads: Gimp,ICQ,AbiWord among others. By the way, some other sites of interest:
    NNTP: inn.qnx.com
    WWW: support.qnx.com
    USENET: comp.os.qnx
  • Really, Linux is monolithic. Sure it has kernel modules, but they can't be reliably used between kernel versions. So often times, upgrading the kernel or changing the hardware (in case you haven't compiled that driver for your kernel before) usually requires a kernel recompile.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • So now that you can get a development version of QNX for free, how to build our own i-Opener/WebSurfer type appliance with it? (Or use it to hack our way out of using the software that comes with one of those units if you happen to already have one?)


    -=-=-=-=-

  • i installed QNX from the ISO. after some troubles getting it to boot, i eventually got into the photon microgui. "this is pretty slick" i thought. i was amazed to discover my SB Live! was supported. unfortunately, my tulip compatible network card wasn't working. i decided that if it wasn't going to work with my network card, it wasn't worth it.

    that's when i decided to go back to windows. unfortunately, i was unable to ascertain from the QNX bootloader how to actually do this. i tried lots of options and keystrokes that i thought might help, but to no avail. all i could do was make QNX start to load and then fail. (i had gotten into it originally with some sort of safe mode).

    so, i busted out the trusty ol' redhat 6.2 cd (remembering there was an emergency boot option). too bad you can't install lilo using that... after unsuccessfully trying, i said, "fuck it. i'll just install a base RH 6.2 over my QNX partition". i told it to reformat the partition as ext2 and install no packages. little did i know that RH would just sit there if you didn't choose any packages. *sigh*

    fortunately, it did delete the QNX partition, which left the QNX bootloader with no choice but to throw me back into WinMe. after a quick "fdisk /mbr", i feel better already.
  • Installed like a champ and boots almost as quickly as BeOS. It's not incredibly stable however, many of the screensavers will dump the entire thing, forcing a hard reset.

    I like the interface much better then BeOS, but BeOS is obviously ahead of the game in terms of hardware support and stability. The desktop for QNX is pretty interesting and instantly more usable then BeOS. The browser also kicks the living crap out of NetPositive. Another nice plus is the package installer for adding add-ons to QNX. That's pretty slick, but again not very stable - bombing itself twice and being unable to open various packages from the online repository. On the networking note, supports DHCP which had me up and running with no config whatsoever.

    On another note, I installed the OS X beta on my G4 today. I was initially impressed with the UI but got annoyed with it rather quickly. Also annoying is using classic apps in OS X as launch time is nearly a minute or two and speed lags well behind. On the plus side, network config was a snap, and the UI does have a few nice things to be said about it, but I felt like a six year old after awhile, which isn't a good feeling. No development tools though!

  • A more accurate statement would be that the Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel, which, unlike the QNX microkernel, does not provide MMU protection of core OS processes. This also makes it much easier to write and debug QNX device drivers.

    You can debate the definition of "monolithic" and talk about "kernel modules" all day long, but the fact is that the Linux kernel all runs in the same memory space, so it is a less robust design than a microkernel. (Note that I said robust _design_ not implementation. It is possible to write a crappy microkernel).

  • Unlike some OSs, QNX is not monolithic. ALSA is just a module somewhere above kernel space, so its not actually part of the OS proper.
  • Anyone know what (duuuh heck) this is?

    skunk:~$ file qnxrtp.tar.F
    qnxrtp.tar.F: frozen file 2.1
    skunk:~$

    Anyway, for the sake of Tucow's bandwidth, I'm mirroring the file here [mit.edu]. MD5 sum = 316236554639edf717a94026ee940812.
  • D'oh! Guess the ISO is the way to go, then :-)

    Tucows doesn't seem to be running slow at all, but if others disagree, here's a little something that should help:

    File: qnxrtp.iso [mit.edu]
    Size: 95911936
    MD5 sum: 75c8dc3a42f80a85ef8c733a317d8ebd

  • I wonder if they tried to beat RedHat to their 7.0 release.. it would of almost been better for the excitement of RH7 release to calm down a little bit.. but I think that it may of rained on their parade.




    --------------------
  • it's fast .. clean ... it remidns me beos.

    but beos is more advanced not not "old style" unix.

    anyway qnx is better then linux for it's quality of code ... but with linux you can do a lot more.

    with Bone and OpenGL coming to Beos .. do I need to trash Beos ? I think no. I'll have Unix networking with a nice GUI (linux far away .. NOW) and a solid OpenGL (better then linux asap for Be is out .. not too far).

    Qnx is kewl anyway ... but too different from BeOS and if compared to linux for SOMETHING is better.

    I'm getting bored of changing OS ... we don't need another OS to waste energy .. Linux and Beos are growing so nicely now.

    Qnx will be a toy in the desktop ...
  • On my PIII 650 laptop the dvd playback keeps getting prempted by the kernel
    The standard Linux kernel is not optimized for low latency. However, there are several developers (and companies) doing work to make the Linux kernel more low-latency without going all the way to RTLinux. This would stop the skipping problem with your DVD drive. Hopefully the 2.4 series of kernels will be much better for near-real-time applications like this.

    In the meantime, have you tried installing Ingo Molnar's low latency patches for the kernel? [redhat.com] You might find they solve the problem for you.

    If they do, could you email me and let me know? Unfortunately there is no kernel 2.2.17 version yet, and that's the one I'm waiting for.
    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

  • Check it out before you download (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Check the preview on BeNews here [benews.com]. They have screenshots and everything.
    BTW, BeOS is better than QNX. Seriously.
  • Interesting, what QNX calls a filesystem driver, the rest of the world calls a disk (i.e. scsi or ide) driver. I guess that means that QNX only supports one file system, or they just call file system drivers something else (further compounding the confusion).
    --
  • From QNX's website [qnx.com]:
    Why is the new QNX realtime platform big news?

    Because it's the only solution that offers embedded developers the benefits of both a true realtime OS and a true platform OS. As a result, it's uniquely positioned to become a premier platform for embedded devices - just as Windows and Linux have become the platforms of choice for desktop and server applications.

    Future battles will be waged in the embedded market, not the desktop market. If Linux is to succeed in Linus's quest for World Domination(tm), then QNX must be the first up against the wall.
  • I am in the process of setting up RTLinux for data collection and device control (using D/A boards and digital I/O). The RTLinux approach seems VERY sound, and straightforward.

    Looking at the QNX website, I can not find any information on what data aquisition boards it might support. Dow that mean I would have to write the drivers from scratch? (Not a problem, I have to do the same to RTLinux, although I can make use of much existing code). How does QNX support such hardware (not listed in "Supported Hardware")?

    So, while Linux, as delivered by Linus and crew is not real-time, it has been successfully used in real-time systems (there are various methods; for my needs, RTLinux's approach appears quite adequate)
  • 2% CPU Usage while playing an MP3... Man, as soon as they Port my Adobe products....

    Why can't the transit system be this efficient?
  • I'm talking about a usable DESKTOP Linux distribution. Even Slackware, which is pretty sevelte, takes up 150-200MB base install, plus 100-something for X, and another 100 something for GNOME and KDE. This includes compilers and stuff like Perl, TK, etc that a Linux distro is more or less unusable (as a desktop) without. I can tell you exactly where all the bloat is.
    A) Libraries. There are tons of libraries on a Linux system.
    B) X. X takes up around 70MB on my machine. The BeOS GUI is inside the 3.1MB app server.
    C) Gnome and KDE. The BeOS WM is also inside the 3.1MB app server, and the "DE" is spread out through different servers.

    You can set up a fully usable BeOS machine in under 50MB. (Graphical, everything.) Try that with Linux.
  • GNOME and KDE? XFree 4.0? Kernel 2.4? Compilers? TK, TCL, Perl, etc? I have a hard time believing that. Of course, if you're using the thing bare-bones, this stuff isn't necessary, but when I say BeOS takes ~100MB, I'm talking full install. Compilers, media players, IDEs, etc (perl, and all the GNU tools). All the stuff I mentioned is absolutely necessary for most Linux distros. Take, for example GCC. You can't really get by without a compiler. Say you have XFree 4.0.1. NVIDIA's drivers don't yet have an RPM for that, so you've got to compile it. Upgrading the kernel usually necessitates a recompile (in order to take full advantage of it.)
  • Real Time Linux is a real-time kernel that runs a standard Linux kernel as a pseudo-userland thread. It is essentially a hack to run standard Linux binaries on an otherwise real-time system.

    Whenever an interrupt is issued, the RTLinux handler is run, and if necessary the RTLinux scheduler. The standard Linux kernel scheduler only runs during idle time. And RTLinux can pre-empt the standard Linux kernel, because Linux is run essentially as a process of the RTLinux kernel.

    So my point is that the latency of the Linux kernel as we know it has no real bearing on the performance of RTLinux. RTLinux is it's own kernel, designed from the ground up for real time. To my knowledge, it shares no code with Linux. Linux is run "on top" of RTLinux, and thus stays out of the way of the ultra-important real-time scheduler.

    Check out their site for more info...

    --Lenny
  • I went to an industrial software conference recently where they had a panel discussion about real time operating systems. I heard some specs for "Realtime" Linux and "Realtime" WindowsCE. The benchmarks used most often are interrupt latency and context switch time. I won't go into a technical description but the sum of these numbers is basically the amount of time between when the computer receives a HW interupt and when the correct SW starts to run. (Times are approximate)

    WindowsNT/Linux ~? milliseconds
    WindowsCE ~100 microseconds
    RTLinux ~10 microseconds
    QNX ~0.8 microseconds

    I just thought I would post this so that when someone talks abput realtime windows/linux you realize that QNX is in a whole different ballpark.

    You may be thinking, why the hell do I need 0.8 microsecond realtime determinism? Well, why the HELL would you not want it??
  • Frozen files (*.F) are a compressed file, similar to gzip or compressed (.Z) files. I believe that gzip is capable of uncompressing frozen files, try doing "tar xzvf qnxrtp.tar.F".

    - Joe

  • Whilst I've not used this latest version of QNX, a couple of years ago I designed the control system for a wafer polishing tool that used QNX for the control system. We ran it on 3 single board computers, one with a hard drive, the others booting off flash and sharing the hard drive of the first. It was nice because the hardware and resources were transparently available on all three SBCs, computer 1 could easily get to serial ports on computer 2, etc. By dividing the control tasks up into a number of modules and using the QNX send/receive/reply IPC stuff, we were able to move tasks around on the fly and the system didn't know or care where stuff was running. I just wished they had supported gcc at the time. Watcom was ok, but it was a really old implementation of c++....

    jim
  • Computer hangs on "Generating helpviewer search database"... dang. I wanted this to work. Does anybody know what's up with that?
  • Not really. If you look at the BeOS distribution, it has GCC, Perl, most of the GNU tools (like sed, awk, bison) its own desktop environment, sample code, media files, etc. The Linux distro I'm talking about is bare-bones Slackware. GNOME, KDE (I need apps from each one), XFree86 4.0.1, Kernel 2.4, ALSA, and various important libraries. You have to look at it as functionality vs code size. BeOS and QNX fit a hell of a lot of functionality, into a very small code size.
  • Actually, my scripts already renice X. It still skips. And it's not Be's highly optimized codec, its the OS. (BTW Be's media player isn't exactly the most tweeked thing in the world. Especially with MPEG video.)
  • Would you like to point out how? If you look at my postings on the BeDev list and BeNews, you'll realize that I critisize BeOS too when the time is appropriate. I never said to anybody that YOU SHOULD USE BeOS. I merely point out when somone is spreading FUD about it, or when somone gives Linux undeserved credit.

  • Re:"Filesystem driver" is really disk driver (Score:3)

    by Froid ( 235187 ) on Monday September 25, 2000 @12:42PM (#755519)
    It's just a difference of symantics. The file system can be a single file, like with Linux in those WinLinux distrobutions.
  • Actually, BeOS is NOT more advanced that QNX. The messaging seems to be better, the net code is more advanced than even BONE (QNet is years ahead of anything else) Photon has a lot of neat features (X Windows compatibility, network transparency) the API has some nifty features (like the mmap BeOS is missing) and the interface API is a little more mature. However, Be does have OpenGL, a killer media kit, and somewhat better graphics-access going for it.
  • I only have one account. I have no friends modding me up. Apparently, the moderators don't share your same "Linux has NO problems" mentality.
  • You're reading too much into what I said. My point is, that from a user standpoint, there is a lot of stuff that is closely tied to the kernel. Y

    It is not real easy to use kernel drivers between different versions. Agree with that part? Okay, that means that there is a very close relation between the kernel and the driver. Agree with that part? That means that the kernel is monolithic. For example, my NVIDIA drivers required me to downgrade a kernel version and recompile in order to work properly. I can't reliably rip out a FS module and insert it into a new kernel.

    Who said anything about ALSA? I was talking about OSS. And I can give you several examples of stuff being tied too closely the the kernel. For example, iptables often requires patches to the kernel. My aformentioned NVIDIA drivers are terribly closely tied to the kernel version. I can't take my sidwinder driver from one kernel and stick it into another.

    You got to the heart of the problem. There is no stable driver API. That encourages a close connection between driver and kernel. That means it is a monolithic kernel. I don't care if I'm using the term wrong from a technical point of view (though I'm not, Linux IS monolithic technically) but I'm using from a "English" point of view.
  • The "QNX Realtime Platform" has the licensing problem from hell. It takes a number of mouse clicks to get there, but start at the order page and read through all the stuff.

    As such you acknowledge that you are not authorized to use any the QNX Realtime Platform: (i) in a live operating environment, (ii) with data that has not been sufficiently backed up, or (iii) for benchmark or performance testing. You should expect the QNX Realtime Platform to be somewhat unreliable. It is your responsibility to take adequate precautions to prevent damage to your resources in the event the QNX Realtime Platform fails. We intend that all components of the QNX Realtime Platform will be offered as commercial versions; however, we cannot guarantee if or when this will happen.

    I thought this was a product. That sounds like a beta or worse. QNX used to be really good about reliability, and I thought that would continue. Apparently not.

  • I never said monolithic is bad. I said that since QNX is not monolithic, ALSA doesn't have to be part of the kernel to work, and thus the kernel need not be Open Source.
  • From the QNX developer FAQ:

    "[I]f one appliance in a home network has an Internet connection, or flash memory, or an MP3 music archive - whatever - all other appliances can access that resource automatically. Not only is this cool, but it can dramatically lower the cost of entry for home networks"

    Isn't being cool reason enough to try it out? This is almost enough to get a second box running in my shoebox apartment so that I can set up a lan and try this out. It's not so much that it can share the resources, but that there's no work involved.

    Mr. Spey
    Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.

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