QNX Archive

You know what's fun? Making claims on the internet about how something or someone was first with something or someone - if you catch my drift. You know what's also a lot of fun? QNX, the microkernel realtime operating system that powers just about any possible piece of kit you can think of. As it turns out, QNX was the first operating system to support a hard drive on a PC. On a related note, a new pre-release has been released of QNX 6.5.0.

For some inexplicable reason I missed the fact that one of my favourite operating systems saw a new release last month. On May 28 QNX Software Systems released QNX Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1 and the associated Momentics Tool Suite, also at version 6.4.1. Even though it's a point release, there's some really cool and new stuff in here.

DTrace has been ported to QNX. "The initial port to Neutrino that Colin and I have done is slightly different from the other OS ports. Since Neutrino is a micro-kernel, we wanted to see how far we could go keeping the dtrace module out of the kernel... And if possible even outside of the process manager. The current implementation has all of the dtrace system code, normally found in the kernel or a kernel module, encapsulated in a resource manager, io-dtrace, and the utility is a straight port of the Solaris utility."

A few years ago, I was an avid QNX user. I used the non-commercial desktop version of this wonderfully clean and elegant pure-microkernel operating system for a long period of time, as a desktop operating system. I liked the whole style of this operating system, its Photon user interface, and its excellent package management system. I even wrote a three-page article about it. Sadly, QSS, the company behind QNX, lost all interest in the non-commercial desktop version, and ditched it, leaving only a hard-to-find 30-day evaluation version alive. Community interest dwindled, and so did mine. Despite my lost interest, it saddened me today to learn that QNXZone.com, a community portal for QNX, has been shut down. Read on for a few short thoughts.

Most people haven't heard of QNX Software, though they've likely come in contact with it. The real-time operating system is used where software failure can lead to catastrophic consequences, even death - from high-speed trains to air traffic control towers to highway toll systems. It's also used in more than 100 different types of cars on the road.

Building on the foundation of Open Watcom debugger cross-platform tools, SciTech Software has extended debugger support for QNX Neutrino x86 targets . In this whitepaper they describe some of the debugger's features and they challenges the team had to make it work.

QNX is powering Neptec's Laser Camera System (LCS) on the space shuttle. This camera system will be used to inspect the Space Shuttle for damage before returning to earth. There's a news release at the QNX web site.

QNX (pronounced either Q-N-X or Q-nix) is a commercial POSIX-compliant Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. The system is quite small, fitting in a minimal fashion on a single floppy, and is considered to be both very fast and fairly "complete." But how does it perform? Stuart Goddard submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews, which shows his experiences after installing version 6.3 of the operating system. Update: The story was removed at osViews.

Service Pack 1 is now available for download in MyQNX section of QNX.com. SP1 addresses critical issues in virtual memory management and embedded (NOR) flash file systems. It also incorporates maintenance fixes to both the Momentics tools and the Neutrino operating system - addressing issues in the IDE, command line tools, OS, Filesystem, and Networking components.

There is an article over at OpenQNX about a possible new desktop for QNX Neutrino. Elsewhere, check the VxWorks-to-QNX porting guide news.

QNX today announced that it is the first company to offer the new Intel C++ Compiler 8.1, a highly optimizing compiler specifically designed for embedded Intel Architecture application development.

I think that everyone reading OSNews will have heard at least something about QNX. You can regard this article as an introduction, but also as a review, and as a "Is-QNX-Ready-For-The-Desktop? article". To start off, I put together a short explanation of the merits of using a microkernel. Let me start off by saying that QNX Software Systems (QSS) does not aim towards the desktop with their Neutrino RTOS.

Adding to the vunerabilities found a few days ago, more have been discovered and posted. These additional potential exploits were discovered by the same person who found the first one posted.

QNX just announced the SMP kit. The Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) Technology Development Kit allows you to achieve greater scalability, system density and performance in compute-intensive systems, such as network elements, encryption/decryption, transportation, medical imaging, storage.