Building a QNX 7 Desktop
membarrier.wordpress.com
membarrier.wordpress.com
I used QNX on the desktop when developing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle from 2003-2005. Back then, at QNX 6.21, you had the window manager, the Eclipse development environment, Firebird (Firefox before the name change), and Thunderbird. Then QNX marketing cut off the free version, and all the free software projects stopped making builds for QNX. Desktop usability went downhill from there.
The desktop environment had very consistent performance, because QNX doesn't swap. (It's a real time system, after all.) I could run the real-time vehicle control system and simulator at a higher priority than the desktop and not have it miss a timeout while doing compiles and web browsing at a non real time priority.
I miss QNX. It's much simpler and saner than Windows or Linux. Yet all of POSIX is available. It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux.
The bummer is that it's not FOSS.
Source: worked in this industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia
15 years ago I waited for GNU Hurd, but now I am very interested how Google Fuchsia turns out. What I read it shapes up nicely, and I can imagine we all will use it in near future instead of Windows and other binary blob legacy operating systems; it might also replace Linux as Android kernel - but that is still just speculation.
Though the "RT" is the only real overlap. It's targeted more at lower end hardware, but does have an x86 implementation.
http://www.minix3.org/doc/reliable-os.pdf
https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/drops/overview.html
nice combination!
It's what professional routers do run. Well, some of them at least.
We used QNX at my last company, which made high-capacity IPSec gateways. We had control-plane boards and data-plane boards, with inter-board redundancy, which meant that if there was a failure on one of the boards, a standby was ready and functional within seconds.
Part of this was thanks to QNX's QNet, which made IPC transparent over the internal IP network of the system. You could launch and control processes on any other CPU running QNX+QNet, a "node" in the sytem.
It was very cool, and I miss it a bit. I certainly loved being able to kill and restart drivers, which were of course user-processes (QNX is a microkernel OS). Since I was doing driver development work, that was useful ;)
Having a proper (intra-application) messaging system makes a certain class of problems -- problems that you just get used to in Java, and Go, and Rust, and C/C++, and whatever -- just go away.
Interesting. Examples?
1) Data is passed between threads/processes using a message bus (essentially, a queue). This means, no need to synchronize data access, as every subscriber gets it's own message copy.
2) Suddenly, you need access to certain data from another module. If the program was architected as regular class hierarchy, you would somehow need to pass the reference to that required class instance or use a global function call. If there is a message bus where the required class is already publishing messages, you can simply subscribe to data from the required module and it is delivered via message bus.
3) You can replace modules easily. The only interface to other modules is via message bus, so you can replace the module with one that publishes the same type of messages.
4) If the message bus is designed correctly, you can move the modules/process to different machines, and they can access the message bus over network. Bus broker just sends the messages over TCP instead and that is totally transparent for both involved nodes.
Btw, I am still looking for an infrastructure library just like that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222202
On the web page it states that Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform.
Kafka has four core APIs:
The Producer API allows an application to publish a stream of records to one or more Kafka topics.
The Consumer API allows an application to subscribe to one or more topics and process the stream of records produced to them.
The Streams API allows an application to act as a stream processor, consuming an input stream from one or more topics and producing an output stream to one or more output topics, effectively transforming the input streams to output streams.
The Connector API allows building and running reusable producers or consumers that connect Kafka topics to existing applications or data systems. For example, a connector to a relational database might capture every change to a table.An example for which Kafka is not a good fit: embedded system which reads a few sensors and does a bit of image processing. Such a system should really be compiled to one or multiple native binaries and does not really need JRE.
Other than on their most expensive, powerful routers.
I've still yet to meet someone who actually prefers Cisco over Juniper MX. I wonder who is buying these?
You have met my ex-boss.He had no reason to necessarily prefer Cisco other than that's all he was accustomed to.
EDIT to add jacquesm's comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14231160
Mine on Lobsters summarizing a lot with links:
https://lobste.rs/s/ensbd6/building_blackberry_qnx_7_desktop...
What really blew me away about QNX though, was that the network was invisible. You could construct a command line on machine A, to run a program on B with a file on C, redirect the output to a program on D with that output going back to A. My boss, sitting in the office next to mine, would run a communications program on his system while using the modem connected to my computer. Wild stuff.
I also had a friend that owned a software company selling commerical X Window servers for a variety of systems. Their fastest version ran on QNX.
program1 | ssh server1 program 2 | ssh server2 program3It takes more than someone just adding a special adapter to produce such an interface, because you also have to change all of the modem applications that consume the `/dev/ttyS0` interface to also consume the unix-domain or TCP-based interface.
Meanwhile with Qnet, an application simply goes open("/net/node1/dev/ser1") and gets the modem attached to node1. Plan9 has a similar capability.
D:
That's nowhere near enough for application development in 2017, POSIX is nice, but it's the bare minimum - kind of like WTO rules for international trade, nice baseline, but you still want better deals with individual countries.
> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux.
Given that QNX is closed source, the state of BlackBerry, the NSA leaks, the subversion of BB Messenger security etc., I'd contest whether that's a good idea.
Is it possible to configure Linux towards this sort of behavior? I disabled swap, and whenever my memory is exhausted aggressively (think a runaway program writing to /tmp, which is on tmpfs), my system comes to a grinding halt.
How does QNX deal with memory pressure?
What?
So true. This is why Genode OS is grabbing my interest these days.
QNX is one of the most ground breaking OSs that I've seen in real life and had the pleasure to work with for a good five years as my 'day job'. It was so good that everything else felt (and still feels) both sluggish and cumbersome by comparison. Imagine an OS that never freezes, one that allows you to restart device drivers and upgrade them on running systems. Use remote resources as if they are local. Control hardware in real time from the same machine that runs your desktop. What held it back is that the company that sold it (Quantum Software in Montreal, Canada) wanted to charge for every bit that left their premises and for a long time it looked as if that strategy was going to win them the race.
Then FREEBSD86 happened and suddenly a lot of router vendors had an alternative, then came Minix and finally Linux. Now none of those three are as good at what QNX does best: hard real time, message passing, clustering. So the fit for these other OS's to occupy QNX's niche was never a good one. And so Quantum stayed alive a little longer. I petitioned them for a 32 bit version when they were still fully behind their 16 bit OS and refused to even consider making a 32 bit version because their old product was selling well and because backwards compatibility must have been a hard nut to crack for them.
So, in about 2 years I wrote a kernel that lifted the userland mostly from minix and linux. Added a network stack and if not for some unfortunate affairs it would have been released as open source.
In a way I'm happy that never happened because I would have been the slave of the rest of the world maintaining that. It's one thing to push an application into the world, those things have a life-span. But an operating system will easily outlive its creators. The fact that Quantum was super aggressive when it came to IP also didn't help the chances of a release.
Every day your life is touched by 100's if not 1000's of instances of QNX still quietly chugging away somewhere in the belly of the systems that keep our infrastructure working.
I'd love to see a 64 bit open sourced version of QNX take over, there is really no substitute for an OS with a sense of time. But I'm afraid it will have to stay a dream, the stewards of QNX have never really dared to commit to open sourcing it for real, I've been asking them for long enough now that I feel that will simply not happen.
I'm curious how much of this depends on the driver behaving sanely at load and unload time, cleaning up after itself, gracefully handling unexpected initialization-time state, etc.
Graphics drivers on Linux are a particularly sad example of what I mean - for example while tinkering with an old PC with I-don't-remember-exactly-what onboard graphics chipset a little while ago, I noted how the framebuffer driver boasted that upon unload it would switch back to 80x25 (which it did! :D).
At the other end of the spectrum, while doing some KMS/DRM debugging on my old ThinkPad X61 at one point, unloading the driver would result in a frozen display - but not a frozen system, so my test cycle became "make; rmmod ...; cp .....; insmod ...". It worked absolutely perfectly (with just a ~250ms screen freeze), but it's kind of sad that this inelegance is the current state of affairs.
> Use remote resources as if they are local.
I am particularly frustrated by Linux's lack of IPC in practice. The fact that I can CONFIG_SYSVIPC=y - that that option exists - means nothing: nothing I know uses it, and I have no idea how to use it. OS-level IPC is not common knowledge. It's maddening.
It's sad the best option here is Erlang: that results in "yay message-passing" being restricted to large monolithic systems. I have wanted a message-passing/IPC-based command shell since forever. That's the one thing I wish I knew how to build.
> Control hardware in real time from the same machine that runs your desktop.
:) you know what this reminds me of? The real-world version of Symbolics Lisp machines. With those you could do anything you wanted, literally - they had no MMU, and I think (I might be guessing...) the memory map was static. Not quite Commodore-64, but the same ideas were there.
> So, in about 2 years I wrote a kernel that lifted the userland mostly from minix and linux. Added a network stack and if not for some unfortunate affairs it would have been released as open source.
Very very nice. Hopefully my question is answerable if I phrase it like this: is your code still in use out there, and if so, what sorts of things would I be doing (banking, using electricity, etc etc) if I were indirectly using it?
More directly, if you can actually provide more info about this kernel, I'm very curious.
> In a way I'm happy that never happened because I would have been the slave of the rest of the world maintaining that. It's one thing to push an application into the world, those things have a life-span. But an operating system will easily outlive its creators. (...)
I think I should mention AtheOS here - this was a little hobby x86 OS one guy did in his spare time. Everything, kernel up, all the way to a desktop with applications. Sound, video, I/O... file system... SMP... C++ GUI... POSIX... threads. Took 6 years (1994-2000). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtheOS
Eventually the project was abandoned, but in 2002 a small group of enterprising developers took AtheOS' GPL'd codebase (\o/) and built Syllable from it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_Desktop, https://syllable.org. They tidied up the UI a bit, added USB support and other things, and make slow progress forward.
Now, Syllable is certainly not QNX. But I wanted to say this: the person (or group) who does the sprint and gets to the point of "ok, it's out there now" doesn't have to be the same group that eventually maintains everything. It's an interesting idea to weigh up, because it instantly puts an upper bound on total development time. That time might be years, but 5-6 years is not eg 20 years. (Methinks it'll be interesting to hear Linus reflect on kernel development after he's retired and can say what he really wants to, and can step back far enough to consider all of his ~40+ years of involvement.)
Now, sure, with a "sprint then step back" approach it's impossible that there won't be disappointment and frustration with the way some things end up being done by the new gatekeepers, but if the implementation is sketched out sufficiently well and the time is taken to get the fundamentals (and the thousands of little things) correct, that could well mitigate the worst of that problem.
The reason I say all this is because I noticed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14230456 which pointed to https://lobste.rs/s/ensbd6/building_blackberry_qnx_7_desktop..., which said at the bottom:
> I’m with Animats that it’s surprising that nobody is cloning QNX in these microkernel projects given it’s architecture is open. Past any patent protection, too, if they had any.
Such an approach would bring many benefits.
Being able to pick the license is the clear winner, of course. It would be an interesting nut to crack, because license changes (at least after public releases) are inelegant, and always run the risk of compromising confidence. This would take some interesting discussion: I personally hate the GPLv3, for example, but "GPLv3 or contact us" might be attractive to interests that need to draft a license from scratch (at least ideologically - of course a commercial license template would be filed away).
Another very attractive benefit I see is that everyone would be able to debate the finer points of QNX's existing design as implemented, and debate what parts of the design are worth copying and what should be reconsidered. Benchmarking different workload types as well as collecting anecdotes could be useful here.
I won't deny that QNX as a whole is huge, and that while building rebuilding the kernel in 4350 LOC (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477947) might be fairly trivial, building everything else (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4266/blackberry-playbook-revie... says the kernel is 100K LOC, I presume this probably includes all the drivers and possibly some of userspace) is going to take, well, a while.
Haiku (https://www.haiku-os.org/) has been in slow development since 2001, and only got to R1 in 2012. So, 11 years - for a small team of enthusiasts.
I guess the next question would be, is an open reimplementation of QNX a sane idea?
QNX is associated with a bunch of different ideas. When you say "open-source reimplementation of QNX that does X, Y and Z," you get to run with the existing context. So, rebuilding QNX could be sane in that regard.
But... Haiku's binary compatibility almost feels like a committee meeting for the sake of meeting now. Haiku is locked to GCC 2.95 (and had to backport a bunch of critical fixes in order for that to be viable), doesn't support BeOS R5 on PPC aka the BeBox (which is understandable, but notable), a bunch of private APIs aren't going to be implemented, and for all that, only a handful of applications work. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)#Compa...)
The question is, how set-in-stone are QNX's various APIs - ie, how much of a non-moving target are they, how well-documented is everything, how well-known are the bugs?
Obviously binary compatibility itself would be a good idea for an open-source reimplementation of QNX, there are quite a few more apps for QNX than BeOS. But the kind of apps running on QNX are the kind that you generally want to be able to leave running for a few years knowing there won't be a scheduling glitch anytime soon - the margins with QNX are a lot tigher than BeOS ever was.
:v
I need to go out now and I want to post this now instead of when I get back in a few hours, so I'll leave it there.
I can envisage that redoing QNX might be a "...dude. No. Too much work. Don't go there." in terms of the investment/reward, with all the details taken into account, but I don't know what all the details are, and with the little I do know it sounds like it could be well worth it.
Ok, from the top:
> I'm curious how much of this depends on the driver behaving sanely at load and unload time, cleaning up after itself, gracefully handling unexpected initialization-time state, etc.
Well, drivers are just processes. So as long as they don't leave the hardware in a totally borked state a re-start of that process should re-initialize the driver and as long as that works I see no reason why the driver would not be able to restart and function.
> It's sad the best option here is Erlang: that results in "yay message-passing" being restricted to large monolithic systems.
And Erlang is soft real-time as opposed to QNX's hard real-time. For non-interactive backend stuff it doesn't matter that much but for front-end or hardware control it matters a lot.
> is your code still in use out there, and if so, what sorts of things would I be doing (banking, using electricity, etc etc) if I were indirectly using it?
I never released other than some very fancy routers where it was used under the hood without anybody being the wiser, but just about every industrial plant runs QNX somewhere, and quite possibly still the 16 bit version on ancient Compaqs.
> I guess the next question would be, is an open reimplementation of QNX a sane idea?
You're asking the guy whose front page post reads 'how to sort 2 tons of lego'? :)
I'm not always the best in making decisions when it comes to what makes economic sense. But I think the world of computing would be a much better place if we went microkernel. Stability and reliability and real time in my book easily trump performance.
> how set-in-stone are QNX's various APIs - ie, how much of a non-moving target are they, how well-documented is everything, how well-known are the bugs?
QNX is incredibly simple at the core. The hard part was to get the interrupt handlers work right, after that it was a walk in the park. But I do recall having a footswitch connected to the reset button because I got tired of diving under the table to reset the machine. No VMs back then...
> Obviously binary compatibility itself would be a good idea for an open-source reimplementation of QNX, there are quite a few more apps for QNX than BeOS.
I would not care about that at all, but I'm sure you could do a ABI layer if you really wanted to.
> "...dude. No. Too much work. Don't go there." in terms of the investment/reward, with all the details taken into account,
Fortunately when I started that trick I didn't know just how hard it was. And eventually QNX did come out with a 32 bit version (2 years later or so).
But an open source version of it would make big inroads into all kinds of embedded systems. But good luck getting the likes of NVIDIA to make a driver.
> Well, drivers are just processes. So as long as they don't leave the hardware in a totally borked state a re-start of that process should re-initialize the driver and as long as that works I see no reason why the driver would not be able to restart and function.
Yeah. Fair point. I think I was conflating OS architecture with buggy drivers there.
>> It's sad the best option here is Erlang: that results in "yay message-passing" being restricted to large monolithic systems.
> And Erlang is soft real-time as opposed to QNX's hard real-time. For non-interactive backend stuff it doesn't matter that much but for front-end or hardware control it matters a lot.
Ooooh. Good point. Now I think about it, hard real-time and message-passing is... I can see why people like it :) those two things together are something I've been trying to figure out for a very long time.
>> is your code still in use out there, and if so, what sorts of things would I be doing (banking, using electricity, etc etc) if I were indirectly using it?
> I never released other than some very fancy routers where it was used under the hood without anybody being the wiser, but just about every industrial plant runs QNX somewhere, and quite possibly still the 16 bit version on ancient Compaqs.
Nice. Very nice :)
(I noticed from a comment elsewhere that it was a 32-bit reimplementation when QNX was 16-bit, and that you dropped it in without anybody realizing. That is both insane and awesome.)
>> I guess the next question would be, is an open reimplementation of QNX a sane idea?
> You're asking the guy whose front page post reads 'how to sort 2 tons of lego'? :)
Oooh! That was you! That was a really impressive design. I found the "jet of compressed air" so reminiscent of "use a desk fan to blow the box off the conveyor" in that apocryphal "$2m consultant" story :)
> I'm not always the best in making decisions when it comes to what makes economic sense.
Sometimes economic sense isn't the best driver of things that become revolutionary ideas. Linux isn't overall a bastion of best practices nowadays (sadly) but it was started as "just another hobby project" that happened to go viral (in the 90s, no less).
But even before that, UNIX itself was purely academic and its designers retained the "information wants to be free" mentality, continuing to quietly release updates via tape even after the licensing wars began.
But besides all of that, sitting around all day and figuring things out without commercial focus (at least initially) - basically just having fun being creative - can be the most educational. Oh, and fun. :D (I've only just recently figured this out...)
> But I think the world of computing would be a much better place if we went microkernel. Stability and reliability and real time in my book easily trump performance.
I don't fully understand why Linus thinks that a monolithic kernel approach is honestly more efficient. I can't help but wonder if it was a case of "it was easier for me to do it that way, shhhhhh", or what. QNX is a microkernel that also offers hard real-time guarantees. I find it difficult to believe that microkernels do not offer practical performance in the face of such capability. But then again, I'm admittedly not an OS expert. (Although https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ANanokernel - thanks Google for showing me the talk page instead of the article! haha - cleared things up nicely.)
I can very easily understand microkernels being more stable and reliable. (Does QNX have anything like Minix's reincarnation server?)
Regarding realtime, I've personally been particularly interested in UI design for as long as I can remember, and one of the things I've been trying to crack for ages is how to get rock. solid. animation. - with consistent fps regardless of what else is going on - and I've finally concluded that there are no alternatives to doing this from the kernel up.
iOS got fluid animation on a 412MHz CPU, 137MHz LPDDR and 60MHz GPU (http://blakespot.com/ios_device_specifications_grid.html) by doing screen updates with hard realtime, AFAIK. What more needs to be said? :P
Also - being able to do realtime hardware I/O from hacked-together Perl sounds like... yes please!
>> how set-in-stone are QNX's various APIs - ie, how much of a non-moving target are they, how well-documented is everything, how well-known are the bugs?
> QNX is incredibly simple at the core.
That's promising!
> The hard part was to get the interrupt handlers work right, after that it was a walk in the park. But I do recall having a footswitch connected to the reset button because I got tired of diving under the table to reset the machine. No VMs back then...
Wow, hah. (Hopefully this was on an embedded box with no/a skippable BIOS? :P)
Nowadays a decent i7 (a decent one) can get 200MHz emulated performance in Bochs, AFAIK.
And there are tons of other emulation and simulation options out there: on my way to relocating http://www.marss86.org/ I turned up https://github.com/cap-lab/tqsim and http://www.unicorn-engine.org/. And those were just what I unintentionally stumbled on, not what I was deliberately looking for.
FWIW, MARSSx86 is a fork of QEMU 0.14 with a 200kHz cycle-accurate simulator/instruction logger that kicks in either when you run a command in QEMU's console or in QEMU's launch parameters. So when it's off QEMU runs at full (emulated, non-virtualized) speed. https://github.com/avadhpatel/marss/graphs/contributors shows that development wound down ~halfway through 2012, with very minor updates since. But it's not dead.
Obviously these tools are not perfect, but seem like they might make "serious"/in-depth OS development a tiny bit more fun and accessible. And besides these there's also DOSBox's built-in (and eminiently-hackable) debugger that you can enable at compile time (IIRC).
I also remember stumbling on a little assembler-emulator for DOS that could "play" the assembly backwards, which I've always thought was quite cute. It's easiest to link to the last time I mentioned it (you'll see why): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13807599
>> Obviously binary compatibility itself would be a good idea for an open-source reimplementation of QNX, there are quite a few more apps for QNX than BeOS.
> I would not care about that at all, but I'm sure you could do a ABI layer if you really wanted to.
Oh, okay. Hm.... could this ABI layer itself be a server to the microkernel? :D :D
>> "...dude. No. Too much work. Don't go there." in terms of the investment/reward, with all the details taken into account,
> Fortunately when I started that trick I didn't know just how hard it was. And eventually QNX did come out with a 32 bit version (2 years later or so).
Heh.
This is very very interesting, then. Depending on how long ago you did this (sounds like it was a while ago - not sure when QNX went 32-bit) you might remember quite a bit if you tried to do it again.
And if you did, you've already done the "re-do QNX, fixing all the less-than-ideal bits that couldn't be identified as such at design time" thing - so you'd be going over it a second time, with potentially even more refined results.
> But an open source version of it would make big inroads into all kinds of embedded systems. But good luck getting the likes of NVIDIA to make a driver.
Eheheheh. The situation is not nearly that negative now! :D
First, you target Intel. This is simply tedious: there are real specifications floating around, along with a full GPLv2'd implementation in Linux that "just" needs normalizing (basically, distilling KMS and DRM out of the picture). As you go along, you may be able to get some assistance - Intel recently said hello to FreeBSD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13848258, and I think you could describe QNX to be sort of on the same spectrum/track as an OS ecosystem in some ways, so that might translate to not-entirely-closed-doors where/when it would count. HD Graphics is a huge win to have available; many embedded systems (:D :D) don't have discrete GPUs, and the on-chip GPU specifies two video heads (IIRC), can handle 1080p+, and generally from the standpoint of "reimplement QNX" provides an overkill level of hardware capacity/capability. It would be more than enough to get in the door of making a serious MVP (that's actually usable), if you will.
With some kind of established thing going on with Intel, work would begin to try and target AMD, specifically the APUs. This is likely where the NDAs would start, but it would be viable to do so because a) AMD would be able to see the Intel-only situation and want to compete and b) I expect there would be some sort of commercial thing with the OS happening at this point (eg, the MVP attracting some bites, either from VCs or industry) helping things along.
From there, it'd be a matter of going "hey NVIDIA...?" and either waiting 2E14 years^W ^W for a port or getting specs to help out.
I realize I've naïvely just described a very high-level timeline involving tens of man-decades of development, a noteworthily large team, and probably a 7 figure budget. Sounds like a ridiculous amount of fun :)
I'll also admit that my experience with C is not quite where I'd like it to be, and I've never written about an OS before so I'd have no idea where to start.
But I'm game if you ever feel like doing this at some point. I was thinking of maybe making a website (hmm, what to call it - I have no idea) so people could have a hub/point of reference to point to and figure out what to work on and stuff.
That being said, no rush; this sounds like a fun idea, best to keep it that way. So TL;DR get in touch if you ever want to pursue this :P
(To clarify - I'm not saying you have to email to reply to this comment, just that my email's in my profile if you want to get in touch in future.)
Tangent: It's a shame that Blackberry hasn't captured more of mobile phone market with the QNX based BB OS10 - I got myself a BlackBerry Passport couple months ago and find it is a great daily driver for my needs. Square screen (1400x1400) and physical keyboard ftw.
It's got a rather enjoyable development experience too. Momentics IDE let's you write QML/JavaScript apps that automatically refresh running instance on phone after every save, much like one would expect nowadays with React. Wrote a simple DI.fm Radio Streaming app[1] over a course of few nights - I haven't had that much fun scratching-own-itch and learning new platforms since playing with Delphi almost two decades ago...
[0] http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
[1] https://github.com/slobo/BlackBerry-10-Digitally-Imported
Another very small yet very full-featured OS is MenuetOS: http://menuetos.net/
That being said, I hated momentics!
Has anyone written about what blackberry actually tried to do to prevent losing to Apple? My memory is that they basically were convinced there was no way they could lose their marketshare, so effectively just watched as they lost everything.
Scandal distracting them, playing by the old bandwidth rules too long, and Verizon wanting an iPhone killer (which is different from RIM/Blackberry's focus) were the lessons I read. Remember, they hit their max market cap a year after the iPhone.
Back then QNX was definitely targeted at real time/embedded but you could also just use it like any other UNIX. Ease of installation to a functional X Windows desktop on PCs was minimal effort (one floppy?).
Somewhere along the way QNX lost this reason to exist - realtime interrupt handling etc. - and it being the easy, accessible tool for quickly putting together real time things, e.g. for broadcast, where the only coding requirement is simple scripts with the OS making it all work realtime reliably. In those days you couldn't just use a normal operating system for such things, it had to be your own EEPROM or something done higher level in QNX - a quick and dirty solution to some extent, in a good way.
Having read the article it now seems that getting started or up to speed on a QNX project is no longer something that can be done in an afternoon, it is all a whole lot less accessible.
Over the last decade, QNX management managed to piss off everybody needed to support their ecosystem - open source developers, point-of-sale systems people, robotics people, hobbyists, and even industrial real-time developers. All the money is is selling to high volume markets, and that meant automotive and Blackberry devices. But that focus cost them brand awareness and a pool of people familiar with the thing.
I hope it gets open sourced when Blackberry goes bust.
Gateway, a PC clone vendor, had acquired the rights to the Amiga brand and technology in early 1997. The company wanted to expand outside the Wintel space, and Amiga still had major brand recognition in Europe. The new Amiga would be a PowerPC-based consumer computer built by Gateway and equipped with the QNX operating system.
It didn't work out, of course -- such was the curse of the Amiga. Here's an account with some more details of what happened:
I can't help but wonder how a Raspberry Pi Port would fare - the thing would be tremendously efficient, and it would certainly increase their popularity.
Edit: well, apparently someone ported QNX 6, but licensing requirements seem to curtail its use for hobbyists - https://github.com/varghes/Raspberry-QNX
I don't mean maintainability as in the system itself didn't work. I mean the pain of updating, upgrading, and adding to our system. Maybe the shop I was at just didn't have things set up well, but as a result we were trapped on a specific version of neutrino while trying to interface with modern networked and front end systems. When we can easily upgrade a Linux kernel, apt/yum/pacman install a package, and have more modern versions of our toolchains, it was easy to justify the switch. Not to mention not having to port 3rd party packages we decide to use, which is out of the question for the closed source ones and frankly just a lot of work for the open source ones.
It honestly felt like we were always stepping back 10-15 years in time trying to do something on QNX. And unless there is some hidden community I never discovered in my short stint as a qnx oriented dev, anytime I would stumble upon a forum for qnx stuff it seemed like the last post was from 2008 or so. And don't get me started on their online docs. "Oh this web documentation for <thing> is deprecated. Click this link (that dumps you on the front page of multi-page, hard to search HTML docs) to go to the up to date documentation."
It really is a shame too, because their IPC setup was insanely powerful. And I don't think I ever actually experienced an OS crash. The whole OS boiled down to its IPC concept, and that's what made it so cool and so useful: - Kernel module? IPCs under the hood to 'plug in' to the system. - POSIX? Thin wrapper over the IPC stuff. - Need to talk between your processes? Sure you could use sockets or shared memory like Linux, but those QNX IPCs work fine (and I'd argue they were way easier to use, too). - Networked processes? Just use that same IPC setup. - Networked/distributed OS stuff? The OS is built on those IPCs you just networked in the previous bullet.
I think you can configure with --with-x-toolkit=no to avoid the GTK dependency.
It doesn't look too terrible, either: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NoToolkit
QNX was prohibited from giving source out once it was acquired by Blackberry :(
I'm not sure how anyone can try out what OP has posted, is there any source we can hack on?
I said that ^ last time QNX got brought up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777520
Quick UNix (QUnix, which became QNX "after a brief infestation of AT&T lawyers" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834334) seems to be one of the cooler UNIX designs (and OS designs) out there. (As an aside, does anyone know anything about Dan Dodge's "hand-made modem" referenced in that thread? There are no citations I can follow, I've been curious for months.)
Sure, it probably has its fair share of little insanities (which are not common knowledge due to it being closed source) but it seems the things QNX gets right more than make up for them.
I have three very pointed questions. I'd love answers, suggestions or critique to any or all of them.
1. Does anyone know someone who knows someone [...] who might be able to unearth "the right person to talk to" at BlackBerry about QNX? While I'd probably want to defer the actual conversation to a person (or small group) more familiar with QNX from real-world experience in industry, my motivation behind adding this point is the hope that there may still be some glimmer of interest in a shared-source model, and that - and I really hope this - the source-access shutdown was simply due to insufficient time to refine the contracts (because the buyout was executed at a particularly fast-moving instant in time). My thinking is that BlackBerry doesn't realize the QNX enthusiast community exists because they were shut down, and that if BlackBerry could be made aware of the fact that there are still big fans out there, it might be a simple matter of adding a couple clauses to some super-high-level document to eg re-allow academic access. (Yes, this point has a lot of naïveté in it, but one can dream, right?)
1a. As a continuation of the above question, if I had a question/notation for BlackBerry/QNX, it would be this: a) QNX had a shared-source release, and seemed to be making good progress with that (in short, people weren't running off with the code); b) the automotive industry and other large interests sound like fairly stable considerations for QNX; could this affect (a) in the future in any way? If this were possible, would it be possible for Photon to be included (perhaps with no warranty or code updates)?
2. Can anyone who still has an old copy of the shared-source releases from before the BlackBerry buyout dig out the license files? I'm very very curious to see if there are any loopholes I could edge through sideways...?...
3. There is terribly little easily-findable documentation on the Internet helpful to OS enthusiasts who have ahem stumbled on certain TTHs and want to explore what they have found solely for personal research. While I had success with QNX 4 some time ago (note what I am saying), I'm quite stumped about what to do for any version beyond that. I'm very interested to learn whatever I can here, perhaps via email (where I can share notes too).
Very frustrating.
I completely share your sentiment and your vision.
It seems that BB bought QNX for $200M: http://blog.vdcresearch.com/embedded_sw/2010/04/update-2-rim...
If I may ask, I'm very curious (and I suspect others may also be interested in this datapoint) - what sort of ballpark......? And what were you requesting?
Also, I have to admit that I'm unsure what you mean by "'randomware' style buy-out" - the only definition of ransomware I'm finding on Google (searching for "randomware buyout", heheh) throws back info about malware. I'm not as well-versed in business to be able to intuit what you're getting at there :)
You've probably noticed that I also replied to your top-level comment.
Well, you already supplied a number. I figured since they had not done QNX any favors they should be happy with a bit of a discount, especially because I did not care for the branding.
> And what were you requesting?
Open source the complete OS as it was available at that time, without the brand. Perpetual license (they'd already done a release-and-retract once before). Other deal parameters to be negotiated.
Anyway, as it is I strongly suspect that QNX will go under with BB at some point, or that it will get sold to the highest bidder in some kind of bankruptcy proceedings. Which likely will be quite a bit cheaper :)
I already wrote one QNX clone for 32 bits, it should not be too hard to make another for 64 bit mode and it would be a lot cheaper too so maybe that's a better way to go about it. It really isn't all that difficult, the fact that it starts off with an extremely simple kernel makes the whole problem far more tractable than it would be for a comparable macro kernel, the scope that needs inspecting to home in on a bug is a very small fraction of what you get with a macro kernel and if a device driver crashes you can simply inspect the core dump of that device driver.
And with VMs as a test bed that job got so much easier.
Kind of reminds me how I had completely different priorities than other kids in school when I was growing up.
And then QNX Screen <-> wayland integration and you'd have a full fledged desktop full stop.
Doesn't this imply some licensing troubles with the proprietary QNX license?
https://lobste.rs/s/ensbd6/building_blackberry_qnx_7_desktop...