We have discovered a critical bug in QNX 6 kernel in a networking scenario. There is no workaround, since the bug was in the core of their message passing infrastructure - a non-blocking by design kernel call, SendPulse(), sometimes blocks.

It took me 9 months talking to them about this problem until I managed to reproduce it on just two nodes and half a page of code, and record kernel logs that clearly showed a race condition.

We have received a patched kernel in a few days, and it worked like that for a while. This fix was merged into the official release after almost two years.

After that - only Linux, where we can see and fix stuff. No proprietary code and bureaucracy, no "fast, robust and reliable" operating systems.