QNX 8 goes freeware – for non-commercial use

Version 8 of the Software Development Platform for the QNX microkernel real-time OS has gone freeware – but there are some strings attached. With a new outreach initiative it calls QNX Everywhere, Canadian RTOS vendor Blackberry is trying to drum up more interest in its lightweight, microkernel-based, Unix-like real-time OS. …

[elsergiovolador]

Flop

I still have QNX on a floppy somewhere.

That said, I don't see the point. You'll get some hobbyists installing it, clicking here and there and that's it.

No one serious is going to invest their time in this.

They should probably base it off certain revenue level or simply offer clear pricing that could be manageable from small to large business.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Flop

>No one serious is going to invest their time in this.

Where do the cool kids go for a small RTOS in these modern times?

VxWorks don't return your calls unless you are NASA. Integrity requires you have your own Airforce.

Use a Linux and hope that with enough spare CPU anything is realtime-ish ?

[zapgadget]

Re: Flop

> Where do the cool kids go for a small RTOS in these modern times?

FreeRTOS

[Dwarf]

Re: Flop

FreeRTOS is used on all of the ESP32 family from Espressif, so even your most basic Arduino user is using it, even if they don't know its there yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "VxWorks don't return your calls unless you are NASA."

I hope that this is not your experience.

VxWorks is in Nuclear, Medical, Networks, Mobile Phone Base Stations, Space, Aircraft, UAVs, Trains, Cars, Trucks, Ships and Boats that I know of personally. I also run it on a Raspberry PI and a Beagle Bone, to mention just two low end targets.

Yes, I do work for Wind River, porting, certification and support, hence anonymous.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "VxWorks don't return your calls unless you are NASA."

Also many military vehicles and robots - Honda Asimo for instance and road vehicle production lines.

[Tridac]

Re: "VxWorks don't return your calls unless you are NASA."

Vxworks, remember that and a course from around 1995, arm and a leg licensing at the time.. Quite good for it'e time and did have a tcp/ip stack. But, is there a free version for non commercial use ?. Not much use otherwise. Loads of other open source rtos now, Microcos, being another.

[Nathan B]

Re: Flop

> Where do the cool kids go for a small RTOS in these modern times?

I've been using Micrium µC/OS-III. The source has been available and there is an in-depth book on the inner working.

[JohnAtQNX]

Re: Flop

Not-anonymous John at QNX here!

This past week I've been speaking with young engineers who want QNX on their resume but don't know how to get there. This is huge for them -- they can now download the full QNX SDP, port content and develop some projects, then show their QNX familiarity on their CVs.

BUT! I want to make sure we're not missing the bigger picture and perhaps the bigger point: companies who are prototyping new ideas and new products can use these licenses to do that prototyping cost-free before they pivot to commercialization. No more prototyping on other systems before implementing code on the QNX platform -- just do it all on QNX from the start. This is a huge time and cost saver for organizations working with QNX, and opens a free path to those orgs evaluating QNX for their prototypes.

[Korev]

Looks at the QNX page - buttons that look like buttons, you can easily see which is the selected window....

Why did we make OS design worse?

[elsergiovolador]

To create second revenue stream - courses and certifications.

[Lee D]

It is my assertion that if you dialled back the Windows UI 25 years, we would actually be more productive than today, everything else being the same.

I don't know what all the UX/UI designers have been doing in all that time except make their lives so much easier that they can all put their feet up, because everything is a blank gray box, relies on search to find anything, and removes 90% of the options you used to have.

I mean, whatever happened to actual theming? Why can't I just run the latest Word with a "Word 2000 theme" if I - as the user - want to do so? Where's the harm in that?

Sorry, but UX/UI has taken a downhill plummet for decades now and it's got to the ridiculous point where I'm FIGHTING AGAINST IT rather than it just getting out of my way.

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Oh I'd go further back than Word 2000. Word 2.0c would do for me.

But then I started with WordStar and CalcStar on CP/M so maybe I'm stuck in my ways.

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

> It is my assertion that if you dialled back the Windows UI 25 years, we would actually be more productive than today,

I tend to agree. There was a sweet spot in the 1990s and it has been deteriorating since the Windows XP era, which introduced the rot of "theming" and "skins" globally as standard, hastening the end of the standardised UI.

MICROS~1 is complicit. For instance, it did a deal with Corel, which licensed the look & feel of Office 2000 (and VBA) for Wordperfect Office -- so then, MS being MS, it pulled the rug out and introduced a whole new look & feel for Office XP, which left WPO looking stale and old-fashioned.

(Another term of the deal was that Corel ceased all Linux development, which is why Wordperfect for Linux was killed, its work on WINE and the WINE-based port of WPO to Linux was axed, NetWinder was spun off and Corel LinuxOS sold off to Xandros.)

> Sorry, but UX/UI has taken a downhill plummet for decades now and it's got to the ridiculous point where I'm FIGHTING AGAINST IT

Fighting the good fight.

Teach people how to use keyboard shortcuts. Argue for standardisation of keyboard shortcuts. Accessibility is UK law and it should be worldwide law.

Document this stuff. Write how-tos and share them. Make videos. Make podcasts and talk about it.

[zapgadget]

> There was a sweet spot in the 1990s and it has been deteriorating since the Windows XP era, which introduced the rot of "theming" and "skins" globally as standard, hastening the end of the standardised UI.

Wait. I thought we lost the ability to change even colours in Windows? Then I have to admit, I've barely tried for 25-odd years.

[Liam Proven]

> Wait. I thought we lost the ability to change even colours in Windows?

It's a bit like hemlines.

First we got fugly themes, and if you knew what you were doing you reset it to Classic and then you disabled the Themes service from starting.

Then we got a compositor, and you couldn't even toggle command prompts full screen any more, so we had to learn to live with the themes... and honestly, when you got used to the transparency, it was actually quite pleasing.

So they took that away and gave us flat instead, and now people want the old themes, or even the old no-theme look, and you can't have it.

[Insert Pastor Niemoller pastiche here]

[thames]

Registration required

Requiring registration is going to kill a lot of casual developer interest right there. Too many people are going to see the need to talk to QNX about a non-commercial license as just being a tool for generating sales leads for QNX salesmen.

If I could just download an image that I could run in a VM or on a Raspberry Pi I might port some of my open source software libraries to it. If I have to jump through hoops, then why bother?

I would think that getting more people to use QNX would be in the company's interest. In terms of generating revenue it's easy for them to find who the big customers are who are shipping QNX in commercial products. It's not like they need to worry about per-CPU server licensing customers in corporate server rooms.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Registration required

It's like you go down the street and pass through a strip club, look through the window and see QNX shaking its goods to the phonk beat, bouncer says: "your name and email address". You say "no thanks I am dislexic" and quickly go home to your Linux machine, open and close some apps to let off the steam.

[mevets]

Re: Registration required

Yes; please more of these similes.

[Roland6]

Re: Registration required

Going back to the 1980s, we used product registration (after 30 days), support calls and other methods to find out where our product was being used. We wanted our product to be used and skunk worked into an organisation. It was always nice to be able to tell a manager that whilst they might officially be using x, most of their team were in fact using our product, so perhaps we should just formalise the arrangement…

[JohnAtQNX]

Re: Registration required

> If I could just download an image that I could run in a VM or on a Raspberry Pi I might port some of my open source software libraries to it. If I have to jump through hoops, then why bother?

We're working on it! It's hard to change big systems built for B2B overnight, but it's a core goal for the team. In a perfect world you can just hit a download button and get the image for Pi/VM/cloud/etc and be on your way. And perhaps included as built-in option in the Pi Imager utility!

For now though, we need a registration. It's a quick email verification loop and everything is auto-approved -- no need to "talk to QNX" (though I'd love to shoot the breeze about projects and porting any time!) Your account allows you to get the host-side SDP (w/ toolchain), which you'll need for developing and porting anyway. Hope this helps!

[jcday]

Intriguing.

There are a number of non-microkernel RTOS' (VxWorks, FreeRTOS, etc) and these will be the chief competition as most software corps really don't understand what kernel architecture has to do with things.

Of the microkernel RTOS' out there, SEL4 is probably the most studied, out of necessity due to the requirement that it meet very high standards of proof of correctness.

There are others, but they seem to be mostly proprietary and niche.

And, of course, these days, Linux does soft realtime (now the final patches are in).

QNX, to compete, is going to have to have a very convincing selling point.

Clearly, the makers think they have one. I will be watching this with interest.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: QNX, to compete, is going to have to have a very convincing selling point.

Doing a quick look on the first page I can't see if the one impressive part from back in the maybe Amiga days is still there.

If I'm not misremembering, you could do OS updates without rebooting. Would be nice in many situations. Like update your router's OS with bug fixes without having to restart it.

[IvyKing]

Re: QNX, to compete, is going to have to have a very convincing selling point.

Your memory is correct, modules in the OS could be updated while the machine was still running.

I used QNX 4 and 6 at work for a number of years, impressions were more positive than negative. IIRC, version 4 used ksh as the default shell, the NFS implementation worked well, the "worst" thing was Photon was unique to QNX and wasn't widely supported. The default text editor for version 4 was Vedit, which brought back memories of micro-computing's early years.

[elahav]

Re: Intriguing.

There is a lot of confusion that stems from the term RTOS being applied to very different systems. FreeRTOS, RT-Thread, NuttX etc. are not interchangeable with QNX. The former are light-weight thread execution environments with little or no separation between kernel and user, no process model, virtual memory, etc. On the other hand, they run on small MCUs where QNX doesn't.

The comparison with Linux boils down to whether or not you buy the argument that a micro-kernel OS provides safety and security advantages over a monolithic one, and that those advantages offset the micro-kernel overhead.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Intriguing.

> the term RTOS being applied to very different systems.

Agreed. If anyone can point me to a taxonomy and associated nomenclature, I'd welcome it.

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Intriguing.

Deterministic - consumes the same number of clock cycles as it responds in the same way every time.

Real time - reacts in a known number of clock cycles to external events.

Separated in time and space - usually a hypervisor based solution that runs multiple applications on the same hardware, but ensures that they neither interfere with each others memory or execution times.

Hypervisor - a bare metal kernel that enforces time and space separation between guest OS or applications.

Micro kernel - a minimum set of basic functionality to allow an application to run. (A hypervisor is often a micro kernel.)

Containers - the flavour of the day encapsulation method for applications

Certifiable - artefacts can be provided to demonstrate compatibility with EN 50128, IEC 61508, IEC 62304, ISO 26262, DO-178C, and ED-12C, etc.

e.g. VxWorks is a certifiable, deterministic, real time OS that enforces time and space separation between applications, containers, or in the hypervisor version, between guest operating systems.

[elahav]

Re: Intriguing.

Separation does not require a hypervisor. On Windows. Linux. *BSDs, QNX (and a few other systems) each process executes in its own virtual address space, spatially isolated from other processes. The kernel runs in a different privilege mode than user code, and is not accessible other than through a gated interface. That is not true for most of the RTOSs out there.

Additionally, on QNX, minix, helenOS and other micro-kernel OSs, the isolation extends to various system services, such as the file system, network stack, graphics drivers, etc., each of which runs as a user-mode process in its isolated virtual address space.

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Intriguing.

Separation of multiple OS (including bare metal) on the same hardware requires a hypervisor (which is what I wrote).

Gated interface to the kernel and resources, with each process in its own virtual address space, IS a normal feature of some RTOS. (I wrote the LRAT and some MMU code on a particular processor, for VxWorks 653, for instance.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Intriguing.

I'm gonna sound like a sales pitch, but I’ve been a long-time user of QNX in the automotive industry. QNX is Safety Certified to ISO 26262 out of the box and is widely used in automotive applications. It’s also certified for medical and industrial uses I think. This is largely due to its microkernel architecture, which ensures that QNX doesn’t crash even if the networking stack [or insert other driver here] does. Linux is not.

People have been trying to safety certify Linux for ages (looking at you, DeadRat), but so far, the only useful certification is maybe a math library. The Linux ecosystem is great, but you get what you pay for. Trying to safety certify off-the-shelf Linux tools from some random repo is a painful experience, not to mention the nightmare of patching a kernel bug or vulnerability for a product that’s been shipping for over five years in the automotive world since one kernel patch is never done in isolation of other patches that you don't necessarily want.

QNX also has an embedded hypervisor, with the same certifications as the RTOS. In my work environment this hypervisor is driving (pun intended) the consolidated cockpit designs in automotive.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Comments Rather Mild...

compared to the tirades against and rants about the companies that own and have owned QNX I have appeared in other fora. ;)

Ignoring the intensity of these outbursts the sheer number would suggest to me that QNX and the whole kit and kaboodle is best avoided.

Back in the '90's I tried one of their floppies which I think I got from a Freeware company and was rather impressed but I was mucking about with Minix and Coherent and never followed it up. I do remember there was a local company making steel pipes using some type of electric welding process which was controlled by PC running QNX. But then in another city there was a textile design company using the Whitewater Group's Actor and Windows 2 to write their design applications. Two places I never got to work for but I imagine sooner rather than later both businesses were offshored to the PRC.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microkernels are great ...

... but if I had to choose between QNX and some L4 (or maybe SeL4), I'm not entirely sure of why I'd pick the former ... (unless I was paying for it, to ensure I'd get customer support, for serious industrial use ... rather than for conceptual exploration).

[FF22]

Yeah, no

"We stress genuine microkernel, because microkernels were very trendy in the late 20th century for a while and as a result everyone and their dog claimed their OSes were microkernels. Microsoft bruited it about the massively monolithic Windows NT kernel."

Yeah, no. Microsoft never claimed Windows NT's kernel to be a microkernel, but instead advertised as being a hybrid kernel, which is a mix of microkernel and monolithic kernel design. It also isn't or wasn't "massively" monolithic, but had very good microkernel tendencies - which, however, proved to be very ineffective and performance constraining in practice, and that's why it shifted more towards the monolithic end during its first few iterations (Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000). However, even today Windows kernels are far from as monolithic as for ex. the Linux kernel is, which is the epitome of a truly monolithic kernel.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Yeah, no

Like I'm a hybrid athlete, I combine the number of limbs of an Olympic athlete with the physique.of a sofa.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Yeah, no

> Microsoft never claimed Windows NT's kernel to be a microkernel, but instead advertised as being a hybrid kernel,

You know that, I know that, but hoi polloi does not know that.

O'Reilly:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/securing-windows-nt2000/1565927680/ch01s03.html

"Windows NT is a multithreaded, micro-kernel-based[11] operating system."

MS:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/one-windows-kernel/267142

"Windows NT is like a microkernel"

IT Pro:

https://www.itprotoday.com/it-infrastructure/windows-nt-architecture-part-1

"NT is sometimes referred to as a microkernel-based operating system."

Et cetera et cetera ad nauseam.

[AMBxx]

Blackberry Playbook

No mention of the Blackberry Playbook? Nice little device. Very well built. Let down by using a very easily breakable micro-usb charge socket and the odd choice of use flash for the UI.

I had 3. Well, actually 1 with 2 warranty replacements as the charger kept breaking!

[El blissett]

Re: Blackberry Playbook

Too heavy, too thick, pointlessly hamstrung without an accompanying BB9 or BB10 phone, a business device with a movie aspect ratio?

QNX powered BBOS10 itself was fantastic - the hardware BlackBerry was shipping at this point to compete with iPhones and droids let it down.

[AMBxx]

Re: Blackberry Playbook

I liked the heft of it. It had a smaller screen than the iPad of the time, so had to be thicker to fit all the bits inside. We did have BBs at the time, so worked well enough. Screen quality was great too.

[JohnAtQNX]

Re: Blackberry Playbook

I worked on the PlayBook! My favorite part was how it was the perfect size to slide into the back pocket of my jeans. (At least until you got into the car and accidentally invented a foldable!) That and the browser -- at that time, a pretty solid browser opened the door to a lot of tinkering projects, which I certainly took advantage off. All my web tools at the time all worked perfectly on the PB.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Blackberry Playbook

> QNX powered BBOS10 itself was fantastic

Agreed.

Not perfect but very very good

> the hardware BlackBerry was shipping [...] let it down.

Not sure I do agree here. I had a Passport and it was a fantastic device, with a keyboard that was good enough to compete and also worked as a scroll controller. It was too small for me and slower than Swype, but much more accurate so overall it was competitive because I spent less time fixing typos.

[Tubz]

QNX as a core bare metal hypervisor and then just bolt on what container or VM you need or a consumer router, would be interesting?

[Anonymous Coward]

QNX has a hypervisor. It's an extension of it's micro kernel. Basically VMs run as processes under the QNX OS. As well, they intend to release Container support later next year. Our company is looking to evaluate it as soon as it's available.

[Mockup1974]

I really, really miss BlackBerry 10 (based on QNX and with a wonderful mobile UI)

[rgjnk]

QNX isn't too bad

I think the only time I've really spent with it is to play with some of the software out of my car which has a lump built on top of QNX; the RTOS is fine, the mess of an application layer put on top by the OEM less so...

Not one I think I'd ever use in anger as it's either too much for the small jobs or just hasn't got the more exotic/hardened features for the special jobs but it still has its place in the world.

[AaronCake]

Posting this from my Blackberry Classic

Which still multitasks better than any modern phone. Plus, you know, keyboard.

[Frank Leonhardt]

Linux is not an RTOS

Sorry, but no way is the Linux kernel real-time. I'd accept Neutrino (the QNX kernel) is.

Yeah, you can't run the entire Linux kernel as a task under an RTOS like RTLinux, but calling Linux an RTOS is just adding to the confusion about what real-time actually means.

[d3Xt3r]

You know what would be great? If we could run QNX on the desktop, so that we could do our development completely on QNX.

I don't understand why QNX killed off Photon and the desktop builds. I recall using QNX 5 or 6 on my Pentium III 450 back in the day, and it was so far ahead of Linux back then. The most amazing thing was the desktop responsiveness, especially the fact that I could play audio whilst multitasking - with zero stutter - something even modern Linux distros can still struggle with! And an even more amazing example was the famous 1.44MB demo floppy which fit an entire DE, something that is still just as impressive today as it was back then.

I'm really sad that QNX for the Desktop no longer exists. At least make it opensource and let the community support it, if you can't make money off it. Why just simply kill it off?

[Anonymous Coward]

Free for non-commercial use

Nah, that's a potential future pop up nightmare.

"We've limited your sessions to 5 minutes because we've detected commercial use".

It's shit that like that drove me away from Anydesk / Teamviewer to set up my own Rust Desk hosting service for my clients, I came up for renewal one year and because of my concurrency requirements (despite being essentially a one man band) they wanted £9k+ off me personally and each client was paying over £2,000 at least (regardless of whether they chose Teamviewer or Anydesk), the total across all my clients including myself was close to £200k...I still pay for the support for Rust Desk (because it is reasonable and why not), but because I host all the instances, it's a one to many fee. I pay for the support, which is a cost spread over many clients. I can therefore massively undercut Anydesk and Teamviewer and have none of the limitations when supporting my clients. Not all of my clients take me up on the service, but quite a lot do...especially those with concurrency issues when using Anydesk / Teamviewer. I charge a flat £100 a month regardless of user count, concurrency etc...they get unlimited users and unlimited everything. They get their own dedicated instance (I don't have more than one client on more than one instance for obvious reasons).

Each client is on a fairly respectable instance with 4 times the minimum recommended requirements with at least 10gbps of available bandwidth...I think the cost per instance comes out a something like £20-£30 a month. The rest of the money goes towards keeping the boxes maintained and the support fee to Rust Desk (which I pay for, but I've never actually had to use, so it's essentially free money for them). So the client gets a reasonable, competitively priced, unlimited service, I get a bit of money for maintaining the setup and Rust Desk gets some money they can put towards dev / support. Everyone wins. I don't get to pocket a lot of profit from it, but the money I free up at the clients gets spent elsewhere, like on hardware upgrades etc.

If Blackberry is desperate to get people using it, open source it and sell support...way more profitable for them and the uptake might be a lot bigger...leave something in it for the folks recommending, deploying and selling your product for you...if you cut out the service providers / techies in the middle and leave nothing on the table for them, it'll never take off.