BlackBerry Maker To Buy QNX For RTOS & Dev. Suite

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."

A nice lightweight OS

[shutdown -p now]

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).

Re:A nice lightweight OS

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Re:UNIX-like?

[MobyTurbo]

QNX is a bit more Unix-like than Symbian or OpenVMS or WinNT. It's userland is Unix, with a bash shell, GNU utilities, and so on. So from both an API level, and a user interface level, it's Unix-like.

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.

Re:UNIX-like?

[MobyTurbo]

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.

OS source access is already blocked

[the_doctor_23]

Looks like Foundry27 is being canned:

Effective April 9th 2010, QNX Software Systems has updated its source code access policy. This FAQ has been prepared for customers, partners, and hobbyists and provides details on what has changed.
Q. What has changed under the new source code policy?

Under the new policy, QNX Software Systems will continue to make its proprietary OS and middleware source code available to qualified customers, partners, and educational institutions. However, some of this code will no longer be available to hobbyists or to the general public.

The new policy classifies proprietary QNX source code as either Open (available to anyone under an open source license), Accessible (available to customers, partners, educational institutions, and hobbyists under a new click-through agreement), or Restricted (available to customers and partners with an approved QNX Restricted Content Application).

For example, QNX Software Systems will:

* continue to provide board support packages (BSPs) as open source
* provide various libraries and utilities as Accessible source
* provide source code for the QNX microkernel as Restricted source

Does anyone have a torrent with the current source?

Re:Please don't fuck this up, RIM

[Anonymous Coward]

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 - while still performing as an RTOS.

One criticism is that QNX tends to have a bit more overhead than some leaner less featured RTOSes like Kadak AMX although I'm not sure they really compete in anycase.

The major problem I found was that it's quite expensive and came with a hefty royalty which knocks it out of the high volume low cost consumer space.

UW

[jpmorgan]

Interestingly enough, QNX and RIM are both University of Waterloo semi-spinoffs.