BlackBerry Maker To Buy QNX For RTOS & Dev. Suite 51
Freshly Exhumed writes "Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry smartphones, said on Friday it will buy QNX Software Systems, makers of Real-Time Operating Systems, for an undisclosed amount as it moves to boost integration of its devices with in-vehicle audio systems. QNX Neutrino is a Unix-like RTOS, and their Momentics development suite is for embedded applications for a wide variety of industries. While RIM has offered somewhat limited support of open source projects on its BlackBerry platform, the future of QNX's Foundry27 development project, which uses the Apache 2.0 license, has not yet been mentioned."
Please don't fuck this up, RIM (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, I haven't been that impressed with the way QNX Systems has been handling the platform lately. Momentics can't even self-host anymore, and the UI has gotten a lot worse in my opinion. That being said, I hope RIM doesn't do an IBM-style acquisition where they just take the bits of the victim company that they like and kill everything else.
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Mod up.
Both BB and QNS have excelled in rock-solid enterprise support, not shiny consumer-pleasing stuff, like Apple.
Exhibit 1. Blackberry maps vs. Google maps on BB. No contest.
So do I think that BB will leverage this to create & 'compelling in-car experience'? Nope.
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Re:Please don't fuck this up, RIM (Score:5, Insightful)
I second the sentiment that QNX is a great operating system. My first contact with it was through the incredible 1.44 MB QNX Demo Disk, which was a bootable 1.44 MB diskette image containing QNX (4.something, I think), with GUI and graphical web browser. Did I mention that the OS was POSIX-compliant and real-time? At the time, Linux and XFree86 absolutely paled in comparison.
While on the topic, I would like to say that I would like to have a desktop OS that provided real-time guarantees (or at least "most of the time"). On my shiny multi-GHz, multi-core, multi-GB-of-RAM machine, Firefox still manages to hang the user interface for multiple seconds when it first starts up and I type something it the Awesome bar. I'd like to at least be able to switch windows and start sending input to another application in = 0.1 seconds! If we could extend the real-time guarantees to a GUI library so that we could have, say, button click animations and other "I got your message and I'm working on it" feedback to respond within certain time frames, that would be great.
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You did say "most of the time", but the PC architecture isn't very suitable for real-time software applications. You really need deterministic timing behavior and that behavior has to be simple enough for a human to grok it and static enough that a real-time OS can depend on it.
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I agree that QNX is great. Really really great. It's POSIX compliance is awesome and technically it has some really cool features I've not seen in other commercial embedded RTOSes of this grade. For example, it's a micro-kernel architecture allows device drivers to be written in a re-startable way so they can be replaced/crashed/restarted without apps knowing what happened. There's also some great resource partitioning schemes where processes can be grouped and given hard limits on CPU cycles and memory
Dont follow Palm (Score:4, Insightful)
I spent many hours playing with it on a Dell pentium 133/32mb laptop. when Palm bought BeOS for its software assets hardly any were ever used. I hope RIM does better. they could make excellent products with an OS that light but powerful.
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QNX and BeOS were my choices when I wanted a low-end machine to play MP3s without skipping, back when processing power was low enough that both Windows and Linux couldn't be relied upon to do so even when that's all they were doing.
BeOS had a lot of other useful desktop apps, too. QNX had some, but not as many. Either would remain responsive while multi-tasking and still keep the audio playing back smoothly in the background (sounds dumb now, but that was pretty cool on an early Pentium or 486DX with 32 t
Was it Palm's fault? (Score:1)
I had once to ask a question on the Handbrake irc channel. I was impressed by the intolerance of the developers to somebody asking an honest question. Handbrake counts its origin from BeOS, which I did not know at the time. http://www.bebits.com/app/3478 [bebits.com] If this is the culture they had in BeOS developer community, no wonder Palm could not integrate them. Probably nobody could.
Handbrake has attracted my attention by being a complete tool from a user perspective. However I have ended up using the old good men
Harmon already did (Score:2)
Harmon already did. QNX used to run well on most desktop machines and some laptops, so you could self-host and develop for QNX on QNX. That's gradually been broken over the last few years. Harmon is an audio electronics company. Owning an OS company was out of their league. At least RIM is in the right industry.
I used QNX extensively from 2002-2005, and my desktop machine, plus all the machines in a robot vehicle, ran QNX. QNX runs many of the high-end robots; BigDog, for example, uses QNX. Several D
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That copying is still present in monolithic kernels, it's just from user space to kernel space instead of user space to user space. The difference is that microkernels such as Neutrino are highly optimised to make that message passing fast, whereas Linux tries to optimise all things for all people. Well, everything except Flash video.
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That being said, I hope RIM doesn't do an IBM-style acquisition where they just take the bits of the victim company that they like and kill everything else.
Why wouldn't they ? They are a business and want to make $, dealing with the bits they don't need just costs them. I would also see it moving to all in house instead of a standalone commercial product, and the only BSPs will be for RIM devices. ( i hope i'm wrong, but what motivation is there not to do that? )
But i agree, QNX is/was great, not sure about it being the "best", but it is great.
UNIX-like? (Score:2, Insightful)
If by UNIX-like, you mean a microkernel OS designed for scalability using message passing at a low level and delivering realtime performance and strong isolation of kernel components, then, yes, it's UNIX-like. If that's how you define UNIX-like, then you're probably someone who has never used UNIX.
QNX has a POSIX compatibility layer, but so do Symbian, OpenVMS, and Windows NT and I wouldn't describe any of them as UNIX-like.
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So far as I know, QNX POSIX layer is sufficiently advanced that a large number of applications can (and are) be readily ported from Unix. In my book, that counts as "Unix-like".
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So are the OpenVMS, Windows, and Symbian POSIX layers. Are these operating systems also UNIX-like n your book?
I've never seen anyone use a BASH shell on OpenVMS, fork() on Windows, or anything Unixy other than Qt on Symbian. QNX, on the other hand, is regularly programmed with the Unix API and has a Unix userland as its primary command line interface.
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I've never seen anyone use a BASH shell on OpenVMS
I've not seen anyone use it on QNX either, but it works on both.
fork() on Windows
Worked fine for me under the POSIX layer I was using (cygwin) when I last had a Windows machine (around 2003, running Win2K).
or anything Unixy other than Qt on Symbian.
Maybe you should look harder [wikipedia.org].
QNX, on the other hand, is regularly programmed with the Unix API and has a Unix userland as its primary command line interface
If you use the POSIX subsystem, yes. Alternatively, it can be programmed with the native asynchronous API, which is much nicer if you want scalable or realtime code. You can live entirely in the POSIX subsystem on OpenVMS too and pretend it's a UNIX machine, but that doesn't make OpenVMS an
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fork() on Windows>/quote>
Worked fine for me under the POSIX layer I was using (cygwin) when I last had a Windows machine (around 2003, running Win2K).
If cygwin makes Windows Unix then Wine makes Linux Windows.
Re:UNIX-like? (Score:4, Informative)
Now, if you define Unix as "has X11 as its main GUI", you'd have to define such Unixes as early SunOS (using NeWS) as non-Unix, and define OS X as non-Unix when it is Unix(r) certified, while such clones as Linux get called Unix...
You are right of course that a real time Microkernel is not the typical kernel on a Unix operating system, but then again, several Unixes were made with microkernels, especially the CMU Mach variety which powered the Unix known as OSF/1, which had a Unix vendor of none other than Digital Equipment (eventually it got named to Tru64, and is still in production by HP after the Compaq merger). Real time variations on Unix have a long history, AT&T even made one. Maybe your definition of the Unix kernel is "something that resembles the 4BSD kernel", mostly because that's what Linux resembles best, but it would be in variance with the certification authorities' definition, which is API, or the common user's definition, which would be what the userland resembles.
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``If by UNIX-like, you mean a microkernel OS designed for scalability using message passing at a low level and delivering realtime performance and strong isolation of kernel components, then, yes, it's UNIX-like.''
Correct, QNX is much more impressive than "UNIX-like" gives it credit for.
``QNX has a POSIX compatibility layer, but so do Symbian, OpenVMS, and Windows NT and I wouldn't describe any of them as UNIX-like.''
Agreed, too.
On the other hand, QNX's POSIX compatibility layer goes very far. Years ago, I
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QNX is much more impressive than "UNIX-like" gives it credit for.
When people say "UNIX-like" they usually don't mean to imply a limited set of POSIX features. What they normally mean to imply is "Not an incompatible piece of junk." If I hear an OS is UNIX-like I think that it will be familiar, comfortable, compatible and acceptable. Every UNIX and UNIX-like OS has some features--sometimes fantastic features--that set it apart. QNX certainly has those. To clarify that it is UNIX-like is only a compliment,
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If by UNIX-like, you mean not suitable for hard real-time software, then no, it isn't UNIX-like.
A nice lightweight OS (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I played with QNX, I was impressed with how light-weight it is. I understand that it's an embedded OS, but nonetheless you can run it on the desktop [wikimedia.org], and the UI is extremely fast. I wonder why it isn't used in the same role as those lightweight Linux distros, as a desktop for older systems.
It also has some rather neat APIs of its own, especially those responsible for UI ("Photon").
By the way, if you ever wanted to play with it, it is freely downloadable [qnx.com] (yes, that is the x86 version, so it'll run on your desktop).
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Oh yes, you'll also need a key for non-commercial use - this can be obtained here [qnx.com], though they require you to register with them.
RIM Gearing Up To FIGHT Apple! (Score:3, Insightful)
RIM has finally stepped up to the plate to FIGHT the GOOD against APPLE! YES!
Although I hate to see QNX be owned by RIM, the people who brought us Blackberry (recently completed a blackberry app - icky sticky java with types getting stuck all over the place for no good reason), this is a major massive move by RIM that sets them on the board to fight Apple. Before now it was not even a fair match. Now at least RIM has a chance again.
Whoa (Score:2)
When I read this I remembered back to the last company I worked for. Their in-house MRP system ran on QNX circa 1993 (The MRP was changed over to Infor in 2008). It was very telling one day when one of the girls told me about the lead (read: only) MRP developer had told her. At a particular point in the MRP he said do NOT Hit Ctrl-S. She asked why. His response: it would erase the hard drive.
Obviously, that's not the norm, but now I'll need a drink when I get home tonite.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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Be0s Haiku (Score:2)
Click exciting link
Gossamer threads hold you back
404 not found.
OS source access is already blocked (Score:3, Informative)
Does anyone have a torrent with the current source?
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``Does anyone have a torrent with the current source?''
I would be surprised if there wasn't someone with a complete copy of the latest released source, but what would you do with it? As far as I know, only limited parts of the system are under actual open source licenses. For the rest, you may get the source, but it is essentially non-free. I very much doubt that you could build a working operating system that you would be allowed to modify and distribute from the sources provided by QNX Software Systems.
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Not a huge loss. It was always an attempt to do open source, without actually doing the open source bit. You could look at the source, but you couldn't distribute derived works or even use it for commercial purposes. It was even more restrictive than some of Microsoft's Shared Source stuff.
A shame, because architecturally QNX has one of my favourite kernels. The Symbian kernel design is probably the nicest open source architecture currently, but it's hampered by an absolutely horrible userland. Hope
UW (Score:3, Informative)
Interestingly enough, QNX and RIM are both University of Waterloo semi-spinoffs.
Replacement phone OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does this mean there will be a new kernel for the phones, and a POSIX userland API exposed to developers? This announcement, combined with previous noises about Flash on BlackBerry, make me suspect so. RIM's JVM and apps are still cripplingly slow when compared to the pizzazz-filled user experience of the iPhone...
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Let's see how fast RIM and partners fuck it up. (Score:2)
Let's just say I'm not extremely impressed with RIM or it's partners of choice.
I'm sure all the end-users and central-config buffs out there LOVE the RIM platform and all.
As someone who's had to SUPPORT one for some time now, I'm much LESS enamored of it.
And I foresee the same exact thing happening to QNX over the next several years. Gradually dragged down by lousy support and indifferent-at-best developers.
Future of OSS QNX? (Score:2)
A rather hard core competitive company will be in charge... Do you even have to ask?