13 Dec
2022
13 Dec
'22
8 a.m.
On 12/12/22, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 12:27 AM Andrew Warkentin
<andreww591(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I'm well aware that QNX has been extremely successful commercially and
can be found in a wide range of embedded systems. I'm specifically
talking about architectural influence on other OSes.
The only OSes with significant QNX influence to reach anything
resembling a mature state of which I am aware are VSTa
<https://vsta.org/> and WiNGs <http://wingsos.org/>, both of which
have been abandoned for quite a while. Besides those two, there was
also OpenBLT, which was able to run a simple shell and a few basic
utilities from its boot image but not much more, and RadiOS, which was
abandoned at a point where it couldn't run much more than a hello
world. I'm also working on my own QNX-like OS
<https://gitlab.com/uxrt/uxrt-toplevel> like I said earlier, although
it doesn't run user programs yet (I'm working on the VFS and IPC
transport layer at the moment).
The extensive commercial success of QNX makes it even more surprising
to me that it has had so little architectural influence. Similarly, I
don't get why people who bash microkernels always seem to think that
all of them are like Mach despite QNX being quite successful.
On 12/12/22, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
And yet, for some reason, QNX has had almost no
influence on anything
Be careful with a statement like that. It's likely running in something
in your car. and very likely to be running in something in the last Boeing
or Airbus-based flight you took, and it was used when Amazon made the last
delivery to you. It has long been popular in process control/materials
handling/robotics/fly-by-wire systems.
It's been decades since I've used it, my
comments are based on the QNX that
predated their POSIX conformance. It was extremely light weight, fast,
and used as little memory as possible. I literally had 10 active logins
(tty) with people editing and compiling on a 256KB 80286. Nothing else
came close. But it wasn't POSIX so it might be more bloated today.
QNX 4 and Neutrino are heavier than QNX "Classic", but they're still
fairly lightweight. QNX 4 had the fairly well-known demo disk with a
Photon desktop and browser on a single 1.4M floppy. Neutrino never had
anything quite like that (the smallest official live CD images of the
early versions are something like 60M in size) but it's still possible
to build images with it that are pretty small.