Re: [TUHS] QNX

Andrew Warkentin <andreww591(a)gmail.com> wrote: Wait, are we talking about the same operating system called QNX? We had a customer at Cygnus in the 1990s (perhaps QNX itself) who wanted us to port the GNU compilers to it. It was the slowest, buggiest system we ever tried to run our code on. I think they claimed POSIX compatibility; hollow laugh! It was more like 1970's compatibility. It had 14-character file names, the shell and utilities regularly core-dumped when doing ordinary work, everything had built-in random undocumented line length limits and file size limits and such (which was also true in V7 -- that's one thing Richard Stallman insisted on fixing in every GNU utility; see the GNU Coding Standards). Our GNU compiler tools ran everywhere, they hosted and bootstrapped on everything. Everything except QNX. Shell scripts and makefiles that worked on a hundred other UNIX systems were impossible to get working on QNX. I think we reported dozens of QNX bugs to the vendor, most of which never got fixed. Perhaps somewhere under all that crud there was some kind of "fast microkernel", but you couldn't prove it by me. By the time it got to user code, the only thing it was fast at was failing. We were trying to do real work on it, and gave up after some engineers turned the air blue with incredulous exclamations. I think we ended up cross-compiling the GNU compilers for it, from some sane system. They still had to fix a bunch of bugs in their libraries that we had to link with. I realize this flame is not about microkernels. But perhaps if they had spent less time optimizing cache hits in the microkernel, the rest of their system wouldn't have been shot full of obvious holes. John