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.
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.
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.
The bummer is that it's not FOSS.
Source: worked in this industry.
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?
So true. This is why Genode OS is grabbing my interest these days.
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/
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't this imply some licensing troubles with the proprietary QNX license?
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
https://lobste.rs/s/ensbd6/building_blackberry_qnx_7_desktop...
